
Class 
Book 




_x.__ 



tin 



Copyright If. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



RELIGIOUS 
CERTAINTY 



BY 

FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 

President DePauw University 
Greencastle, Indiana 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 




Copyright, 1910, by 
EATON & MAINS 






© CI. A 2 7 1 6 



CONTENTS 

Page 
I. Life and Certainty 5 

II. The Objections of Common Sense 22 

III. The Objections of the Scientist 31 

IV. The Objections of the Evolutionist 44 

V. The Objections of the Formal Logician 53 

VI. The Moral Sense 69 

VII. The Great Outside Forces 82 

VIII. The Church and Religious Certainty 94 

IX. The Bible and Religious Certainty 119 

X. Christ and Religious Certainty 141 

XL Unusual Inner Experiences and Religious 

Certainty 175 

XII. Summary and Conclusion 194 



LIFE AND CERTAINTY 

There is an ever-recurring debate in theol- 
ogy as to the seat and nature of religious 
authority. In our day, especially, there has 
been strenuous attack upon the claim of 
absolute infallibility as set up for the various 
sources of religious revelation. The doctrine 
of an infallible Church has been assailed by 
repeated setting forth of the very glaring falli- 
bilities in the history and present practice of 
the Church which most persistently claims 
infallibility. The believers in an infallible 
Book have not been successful in replying to 
the contentions of historical criticism that the 
Bible is so much a product of the times in 
which it was written that it cannot be looked 
upon as literally binding for later times. 
Modern psychology and the comparative study 
of religions have robbed unusual inner experi- 
ences of much of their authoritative impres- 

siveness. If we fall back upon dogmatic creeds 

5 



EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTT 

as inexorable deliverances of reason we hear 
that even a chain of logic is no stronger than 
its weakest link, and that some of the links of 
the creed are sheer assumption. When we in- 
sist that conscience, at least, is infallible we 
learn that this doctrine can be only formally 
true; that the concrete duties of a particular 
hour can be arrived at only by processes of 
reasoning which are far from infallible. We 
are even told that the Christian love "which 
never faileth" now and again lands some 
believer in aberration rather than in unshak- 
able certainty. 

It is the opinion of the writer of this essay 
that the debate on religious authority cannot 
come to a satisfactory conclusion as long as 
absolute, technical infallibility is sought for. 
Religion is preeminently a matter of life, and 
in life absolute infallibility plays small part. 
Terms like absolute infallibility have only 
intellectual significance, and rather barren 
intellectual significance at that. We mistak- 
enly emphasize infallibility through failing to 
hold fast the fact that the mind has other con- 
tents besides the strictly intellectual. The 



LIFE AND CEETAINTT 

same agent that thinks also feels and wills, 
and feels and wills at the same time that it 
thinks. The stream of consciousness at any- 
one moment is not the crystal-clear river that 
the intellectualist would like to see. The 
stronger the stream the more it resembles 
other streams in its ability to bear along 
matter which if left to itself, so to speak, 
might sink from sight. Consciousness is on- 
rushing force. 

Since the mind realizes itself as a whole, 
though perhaps predominantly now in one 
form of activity and now in another, it would 
seem that reasonable certainty ought to sat- 
isfy the mind as a whole. Inasmuch as the 
mind seldom relies upon strict argument, sole 
reliance upon strict argument as a basis of reli- 
gious certainty would seem to be of doubtful 
wisdom. We must move out from the realm of 
infallibility into that of practical certainty. 

Again, we must not only insist upon a whole 
mind whose demands for certaintv are to be 
satisfied, but we must insist upon certainty of 
the same kind as that for which we seek in real 
life — the certainty that comes out of life and 

7 



EELIGIOUS OEKTAINTY 

that issues in life. The mind lives upon its 
belief, just as the body lives upon bread and 
water and air. Life is first, and formal reason- 
ing second. The body finds itself in posses- 
sion of certain appetites and, if left to itself, 
consumes whatever seems to give promise of 
satisfying the needs. Experience shows that 
some foods are better than others, but the 
appetite and its satisfaction come first, and the 
discussion as to the food afterward. In any 
case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating 
thereof. So it is in the beliefs of a man. The 
origin of the belief may be somewhat obscure, 
but the man believes a particular belief 
because he finds satisfaction in the belief. The 
belief may be very poor, but the belief is 
ordinarily held fast as long as it satisfies. If 
we ask the ordinary man why he eats bread 
and meat and fruit we may puzzle him very 
sadly. We may make quite an impression 
upon him by telling him of other and better 
sorts of food, and we may expatiate quite at 
length on the absurdity and risk of taking food 
into the delicate tissues of the system without 
being able to give a formal reason for so doing. 

8 



LIFE AND CERTAINTY 

The argument, however, is not apt to hold its 
force through the dinner hour. 

The above statement seems to be true to life 
so far as the individual man is concerned. It 
is also true as far as groups of men are con- 
cerned. We may vary our manner of expres- 
sion somewhat, and, dropping biological and 
physiological terms, say that the principle by 
which the minds of groups actually proceed in 
religious thinking is somewhat akin to the 
principle of eminent domain. A nation which 
has an eye to its own self-preservation has no 
hesitancy in appropriating to itself sites suit- 
able for forts; or it takes lands for roads or 
seizes grounds for parks. The nation does this 
by the exercise of an inherent right to make 
provision for the good of the whole of its 
people. The seizure comes out of the demands 
of the growing life of the nation. Whatever 
ministers to that life the nation looks upon as 
having the right of way. In a larger sense 
civilization proceeds by what might be called 
the exercise of humanity's right of eminent 
domain. Wars are undertaken which are 

really seizures of lands in the name of the best 

9 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

use to which those lands can be put. It would 
be inconceivable that the Indian, for example, 
should be allowed final possession of North 
America. No doubt many grievous crimes 
have been committed in reliance upon this 
principle of eminent domain, but humanity's 
conscious or unconscious movement toward 
the fulfillment of deep life cravings has been 
in large part the real history of civilization. 

In a similar way the mind moves in the con- 
quest of religious truth. The driving force is 
not logical merely, but rather the pressure of 
the whole life for conceptions which shall sat- 
isfy the life. The life takes by assumption 
what it feels it must have, and it holds fast the 
assumptions as long as they are satisfactory. 
If a certain world conception is like a strategic 
fortress for the protection of spiritual life we 
seize it and hold it as long as it commands the 
field. If another conception seems to be a veri- 
table highway toward intellectual peace we 
seize it and hold it as long as we can travel 
over it. If still another idea seems to be fitted 
to be part of humanity's spiritual park system 

we insist upon having it as long as it keeps its 

10 



LIFE AND CEETAINTT 

freshness and beauty. In so far as the ideas 
minister to fullness and richness of the highest 
life we believe them to be true. We do not 
look upon ourselves as so made that assump- 
tions which minister to spiritual wealth can 
lead us to delusion or illusion. In all this the 
aim is not absolute and technical infallibility 
of revelation, but practical religious certainty. 
We learn the truth by venturing to assume it 
as true and living as if it were true. 

But we must steer clear of figures of speech 
and keep to plain fact. Let us speak, then, in 
the language of fact : 

Belief is a fact. However it has come about, 
people do believe. From the beginning they 
make assumptions and venture out upon them 
in the confidence that they shall not be led 
astray. They trust themselves and their neigh- 
bors and the world around. They believe in 
the unseen by a kind of instinct. When they 
do this they are not indulging in any merely 
passive floating on the wings of fancy. The 
mind is never more alert than when it thus 
trusts. Belief in our fellows often prompts us 

to the exercise of most extraordinary powers, 

11 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

The more we believe in men, the more we are 
willing to do for them. The more we believe 
in the unseen and the God of the unseen, the 
more we are willing to do for that God. It is 
a mistake to think of belief as a quiet sitting 
still and doing nothing. Belief is the energy 
of the soul shown in intense seizures and de- 
termined grasps. Belief calls forth vast 
activities. 

Belief becomes all the more wonderful when 
we see how stubborn it is. The belief flourishes 
most just when we think it ought to flourish 
least. The people will go on believing in the 
God of the unseen even when he shows himself 
most inscrutable. Men will with a willing 
spirit endure more from their God than they 
will ever take from one another. Like the 
patriarchs, they will continue seeking for a 
city with foundations in the face of the black- 
est disappointments. They will wander about 
over the desert looking for something more 
stable than the tent which has to be struck 
every night, something more secure than a 
tent-pin, seeking for an eternal city, and will 

die without having obtained the promise and 

12 



LIFE AND CEETAINTY 

yet die in the faith. They will believe in God 
in spite of misunderstood promises and cast 
all upon him most trustfully just when to all 
outward appearances the chances against them 
are as a million to nothing. 

The belief of men in the unseen is not only 
a fact, and a stubborn fact, but it is a fact 
which leads to beneficent consequences. If we 
are to say that belief in itself is no argument 
we have to explain why it is that the real tides 
of largest health seem somehow to depend on 
the trust of men in the unseen. When men 
have confidence in one another we know how 
well the business of the country prospers. 
When the credit is shaken by ever so little we 
know something of the disaster which follows. 
Credit is a mighty agency for unlocking and 
loosing the industrial forces. Likewise in the 
larger relations of life we get on by a trust, 
conscious or unconscious, in the unseen forces 
around us. We bring to the plea for religious 
belief the same kind of argument which the 
men seeking to restore prosperity in a time of 
commercial crisis bring to the side of credit, 
namely, that everything will fall to pieces 

13 



KELIGIOTJS CEKTAINTT 

without belief. The pleader for credit does 
not justify himself by long appeals to meta- 
physics ; he simply declares that credit is some- 
thing we must have if we are to live. So with 
belief. We believe in belief for the sufficient 
reason that belief works. It helps us to get on. 
We feel that we attain to good terms with the 
universe by trusting the universe and the God 
whom we assume to be back of it. We take 
belief as the normal and natural function of 
the soul, as natural as breathing, and we keep 
on trusting till reason for doubt appears. 
There are perhaps separate moments in our 
lives when in particular situations we have to 
doubt, just as there are occasionally noisome 
and pestilent odors which we escape by hold- 
ing our breath; but believing is the natural 
function, and we shall die if we hold our 
breath too long. We seize truths by faith and 
hold them fast, for the simple reason that we 
feel that we shall die in the best part of our 
lives if we cannot have these truths. We can- 
not believe that truths which nourish us so 
healthfully are poison. We do not claim that 
this is proof of the kind that will satisfy the 

14 



LIFE AND CEKTAINTY 

professional logician, but it is sufficient war- 
rant for the reasonable life. In the main and 
on the whole we believe that we can trust our 
spiritual appetites. We take what they call 
for. 

Suppose we were to give up the general 
fundamental beliefs about God and man which 
are the essence of Christianity. Let us say 
that we are creatures of the dust alone; that 
we came forth as the result of a blind process, 
and that we shall die after a little by the same 
process; that there is no God, and really no 
man — only a happy combination of material 
elements. Now, while it is open to individual 
thinkers here and there to hold this creed, it 
will not do for many of us to hold it at the 
same time. As a shrewd thinker has pointed 
out, we cannot allow runs on our stock of be- 
liefs any more than we can allow runs on our 
banks. Society would speedily find itself in a 
desperate plight if large bodies of men began 
to withdraw their belief deposits. The under- 
lying conceptions which uphold business and 
law and the dignities of social intercourse 
would soon tremble. On the other hand, 

15 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

society will be benefited by larger and larger 
deposits of belief accounts. Such deposits in 
general make for the enlargement of human 
life here and now. We will not believe that 
this result comes of a false process. We 
believe in our beliefs for the same reason that 
we believe in a successful investment : the in- 
vestment pays. If we are creatures of the dust 
the strange fact follows that that very realiza- 
tion throws us out of sympathy with the dust. 
If, on the contrary, we can believe that the 
dust is one of the manifestations of a Mind 
back of all things, and that every floating mote 
has come into existence at the will of a Lover 
of power and knowledge and beauty, we can 
see the dust transformed till it shimmers with 
spiritual suggestiveness ; but if we are dust 
and nothing more the dust seems strangely 
terrible to us. No, faith in the unseen is the 
pathway to sympathy even with the things 
that are seen. 

Or suppose we surrender our belief in 
immortality. It may be permissible for the 
individual thinker here and there to do this, 
but large bodies of men must not withdraw 

16 



LIFE AND CERTAINTY 

this belief all at once, for forthwith the re- 
straining influence would be lifted from many 
wills that sadly need restraint. The assump- 
tion that this world is all leads to a fiercer 
scramble for the things of the immediate 
present. The friendship that seemed digni- 
fied with the prospect of continuance in some 
larger sphere becomes fleeting and inconse- 
quential. The opportunity for the service 
of God and man forever is taken away. We 
lose our sense of being at home here; and 
it is the loss of this sense of being at home 
that counts. We are bound to make this 
world conform to our spiritual needs. We 
will not yield to any view which makes us 
strangers. If we find that belief in God and 
man and the unseen makes for larger life we 
shall hold fast to that belief. Faith is the 
evidence of things not seen. It is the force 
that puts us into harmony with the universe. 
We will not believe that the truth is to remove 
us more and more to a distance from the 
centers of meaning and of life. 

The final test is the test of life. Belief 
brings life, and by doing so witnesses to the 

17 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

truth of the ideas to which it points. We do 
not mean that we are to believe what is merely 
pleasant for us, or to befool ourselves in the 
presence of facts by shutting our eyes, but we 
do believe that whatever makes for the largest 
and highest life of the whole man is by that 
very life bearing witness to its truth. If belief 
makes the mind keener, if belief makes the 
heart more willing to bear the cross of self- 
sacrifice, if belief unlocks powers of the will 
hitherto unsuspected, we shall hold that the 
belief itself is an evidence of the unseen to 
which it points. Any institution, any creed 
has to be judged finally by the kind of life 
it produces. The conceptions which the life 
progressively reaches after to nourish its 
deeper needs are by the very fact that they are 
shown to be necessary shown by the same fact 
to be at least on the way toward truth. The 
life of belief develops the aggressive instinct 
to expansion, to repeated seizures of fresher 
and fresher truth. If the lives of men have 
been reaching from the beginning out into the 
unseen for spiritual food how do we know that 
they have found anything out there? By the 

18 



LIFE AND CEETAINTY 

very fact that the lives have been nourished and 
quickened into health and strength and beauty. 
Our beliefs are like the merchant ships that 
drop down below the horizon toward the tropic 
lands. We have never been to the tropics 
ourselves, but we know the lands are there 
because of the food which the ships bring 
back. If souls throughout the ages reach 
out into the unseen for food the very fact 
that the saints have flourished is an indi- 
cation that their hands have not closed upon 
a void. A man now and then may nour- 
ish himself with a delusion, but not so gen- 
eration after generation. We will hold that 
it takes something more than the nothing- 
ness of empty air to feed the intensest force of 
which we know, the force of a hungry soul. 

The thought of the branch and the vine 
comes to us. How does the branch show its 
connection with the vine? By its impulse to 
expand and flower and bear fruit. The belief 
of the soul comes of the life of the soul. If the 
belief dies it dies because some fine arteries 
and veins are clogged. The part which lacks 
belief is dying through impoverished sap 

19 



KELIGIOTTS CERTAINTY 

supply. Progressive doubt means progressive 
decay. It means lack of connection with the 
flowing life which in belief streams in from 
some other world. This, in a word, is the 
method of Christian belief — we insist that the 
belief is a fact to be accounted for, that it is 
a fact laden with health for men, that it must 
point to reality in view of the increasing satis- 
faction to life needs which it brings, A formal 
reasoner may take offense at the logic, but the 
logic is the logic of real life everywhere. We 
trust whatever makes for life. Belief makes 
for life. It is therefore in itself the evidence 
of things not seen. It is the purpose of this 
essay to emphasize the claim that Christianity 
leads to certainty by deepening and enriching 
the life; that out of this enlargement comes 
the demand for advancing religious concep- 
tions ; "that this demand has the right of way ; 
that the certainty which follows the carrying 
out of the assumption is our highest warrant 
for believing the assumption true; that the 
path of progress in religious thinking is 
through making the most of our religious 

assumptions, and through putting upon them 

20 



LIFE AND CERTAINTY 

the largest interpretations which they will 
bear. 

We pause to consider the objections which 
already swarm to utterance against the method 
thus summarily stated. In the consideration 
of the objections the meaning of the method 
itself will become clearer. 



21 



II 

THE OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 

The first objection comes from the practical 
man and is urged in the name of common sense. 
He tells us that our plan means nothing more 
or less than that a man should shut his eyes 
and believe what he pleases. The practical 
man insists that our view is nothing but self- 
sophistication — if a belief is good for us we 
are to hold it fast. This is to do in the realm 
of thinking what many people are trying to do 
in the realm of practice — blink at the tough 
inevitableness of the actual system and look 
only at what is pleasant. Such thought is 
sooner or later doomed to a fearful smash in 
a head-on collision with reality. The plain 
man of common sense maintains that the 
important question in religion, as everywhere 
else, is : What are the facts? 

In reply we urge that we are looking for the 

facts just as truly as is the common-sense 

objector; and we insist, in turn, that the 

objector shall not overlook the facts. Espe- 

22 



OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 

cially must he not overlook the fact whose 
importance we have been emphasizing — the 
presence of belief in the world, the tenacity of 
belief, and the beneficial consequences which 
follow belief. Of course, it is open to the 
common-sense objector to maintain that many 
troublesome consequences follow belief, and he 
may refer to swarms of aberrations. We are 
talking, however, about the great catholic con- 
victions of Christianity — the proneness of men 
to believe in the God revealed in Christ, the 
dignity of man and the worth of life as taught 
by Christianity. There could seem to be in 
the main but little doubt as to the conse- 
quences of such beliefs. The man of common 
sense can hardly have lot or part in this matter 
until he is willing to think of the significance 
of belief as fact. 

We might urge, further, that even the most 
ordinary seeing depends not only upon the 
eye, but upon the mind back of the eye, 
and upon the demands of that mind. To 
an extent greater than we ordinarily think 
we see what we are looking for. We do not 
insist upon this point, however, but rather 

23 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

protest against the charge that we shut our 
eyes upon the facts. We have said that we 
wish to satisfy the demands of our total 
nature — including our power to see the facts. 
If we blinded ourselves we should hardly 
be satisfying the demands of our total nature. 
We call for the most open-eyed and steady 
gaze upon the facts. Still, in interpreting 
and arranging our facts we insist upon some 
sort of perspective. Not every fact is to be 
put on the same plane as every other fact. 
Among the facts of our lives is this ten- 
dency to make the largest and best assump- 
tions we can ; and we maintain that this is the 
important fact. A man stands beside the dead 
body of his child. Here are the facts — the 
dead body and the open grave. But are these 
all? Hardly; within the man is an inner pro- 
test against these facts as being final. That 
protest is also a fact. If the father goes forth 
on the assumption that his child still lives 
and is in the keeping of a good God we look 
upon the resulting satisfaction and the result- 
ing enlargement of the father's life as a wit- 
ness to the truth of his belief. 

24 



OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 

We declare that our method is just the 
method of any common sense that even half 
understands itself. It is the method by which 
we get on. We trust our friends, assuming 
the best concerning them till reason for doubt 
appears — that is to say, till life on that 
assumption is no longer satisfactory. Every 
practical experiment proceeds on assumption. 
We maintain that we must bring out into the 
light this essential procedure and recognize it 
as authoritative in religious thinking. We 
cannot subscribe to a method which blinks at 
even one fact. We do insist, however, that the 
life back of the interpretation of the fact shall 
be made as deep and full as possible, for with 
the resulting depth and fullness come demands 
which are authoritative prophets of the truth. 
Beliefs are outcomes and results. They are 
caused in us by life processes and are, in turn, 
the cause of further life. They stand finally 
in their own right not merely because bodies 
of facts compel us to hold them, but they stand 
in their own right in the same way that life 
itself stands. They come as the mark of the 
instinct of intellectual and moral self-preser- 

25 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

vation. The enlarging of the life means the 
enlarging of the belief. The mind must have 
more and more room. Some beliefs fail not 
because there are not facts to support them, 
but just because the beliefs themselves are not 
big enough. The soul is bound to make a place 
for itself. Of course, it is easy to sneer at this 
conception and say that it is rather flabby 
intellectual procedure which tells us to believe 
what is good for us, but if we make "what is 
good for us" wide enough we have the only 
worthy method. We live in a day which lays 
great stress on the survival of the fittest, and 
we believe that the principle holds in the realm 
of belief as elsewhere. In fact, our very belief 
in the survival of the fittest rests finally on a 
belief that the fittest ought to survive. We 
cannot tolerate a universe in which the unfit 
are to monopolize the success in living. The 
impulse to seize the view which our principle 
of eminent domain calls for is for us the all- 
essential fact. It is for us the sign of spiritual 
life, as truly as the impulse to national expan- 
sion is a sign of national life. 

The man of common sense keeps insisting, 

26 



OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 

however, that he must know if there is really 
anything "out there." We reply that this is I 
the very question we are trying to answer. 
There seems to be no way of going directly 
"out there" to see if there is objective reality 
corresponding to our religious beliefs; the 
only way is to see what is "in here," in the way 
of vitality as a consequence of religious beliefs. 
No doubt there is a difference between the 
object of religious belief in itself and that 
object as held in our thought, but if we find 
that enlarging religious belief is followed by 
enlarging life we shall hold that our minds are 
in the path to truth. We will not have it that 
a belief which lifts us out of ourselves and 
beyond ourselves comes merely from ourselves. 
We must have some deeper cause. 

We insist that our argument is merely com- 
mon sense. We account for faith in the 
unseen by assuming that the unseen world 
somehow gets in contact with minds and 
makes itself believed in. We believe that the 
unseen is at work in causing men to believe 
because we do not find anything among the 
things seen to account for faith. Strong as 

27 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

the material forces are, they are not strong 
enough to make us think that they cause our 
belief in God. And we do not make faith 
ourselves, for it comes upon us in spite of 
ourselves. We cannot completely shake our- 
selves loose from it. If we give up believing 
in one kind of unseen we end in believing in 
another. Believing is as unescapable as 
breathing. Faith, then, is a fact — an actual 
exercise of the whole life in response to some 
stimulus that comes upon us from somewhere. 
We do not prove that the stimulus comes from 
the God of the unseen, but we assume that it 
does and see how the assumption works in life, 
and the assumption works well. 

To use another figure of speech, and this 
time an old, old one, the response of the soul 
to the unseen forces is like the response of the 
needle to the pole. The pole throws the needle 
into a state of immense activity. If the needle 
could come to consciousness and go to reason- 
ing it might reflect upon the fact that it felt 
this irresistible impulse, and upon the farther 
fact that when the impulse was allowed to 
have full sway it made the force of the needle 

28 



OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE 

stretch in one direction. A circle of needles 
around the earth all pointing toward one spot 
would indicate the presence of something at 
that spot to give the needles their direction 
and draw forth their magnetic activities. 
Such reasoning needles might not be able to 
travel toward the magnetic pole, but they 
could locate pretty exactly the whereabouts of 
the pole from the set of their own experiences. 
A circle of souls around the earth or across 
the ages, all pointing in one direction when the 
spiritual impulse which results in the attitude 
which we call faith is allowed to have full 
sway, is an indication of the reality of the 
Unseen Spirit. We have sensibleness enough 
to believe that the good impulses of lives of 
highest and most intense activity, even the 
activity of faith, are not lining themselves up 
around nothing. We do not believe that the 
needles of the compasses on land and sea are 
arranging themselves with dress-parade pre- 
cision around a powerless empty space in the 
north. Faith is the pointing of a life. Its 
pointing out toward an unseen is an indication 
that there is something out there which draws 

29 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

out its power. Faith is the evidence of things 
not seen. We believe in the reality of the 
unseen because we believe. Not much of an 
argument from the standpoint of formal rea- 
soning, but a part of the good sense by which 
we make ourselves at home in the universe. 



30 



Ill 

THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

If a scientist could have heard this discus- 
sion thus far he would no doubt have been 
vastly amused at the desperately unscientific 
character of our procedure. He would have 
been very speedily convinced that the moment 
a man begins a theological discussion he forth- 
with parts company with all those whose 
mental steps are taken with any degree of 
scientific circumspection. A word with the 
scientist, then, may not be out of place. 

Why should there be any science? To an- 
swer this question with a reference to the 
great practical benefits which have come with 
scientific discovery will hardly suffice in view 
of the fact that the greatest scientists have 
very often not thought of practical results at 
all. The scientists have been driven and con- 
sumed by an enormous scientific curiosity. 
By the very make of their minds they have 
been determined to ask why until they found 

31 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

out why. The assumption that we must have 
even a scientific explanation of the universe is 
a good deal of an assumption. As a matter 
of fact, the scientist is one of the most passion- 
ate assumers we know. He is simply bound 
to make a place in life for orderly knowing, 
and will go to any length to seize and master 
facts. 

The great scientific principles have been 
won by the exercise of a right of intellectual 
eminent domain. We will not discuss such 
abstruse matters as the atomic theory, for 
example, with its agreement upon atoms as 
convenient theoretical creations which the 
mind holds as resting places in spite of the 
contradictions which make their nests in them. 
Take rather the principle which we call the 
uniformity of nature. Without attempting a 
formal definition, we may say that the essen- 
tial meaning of this principle seems to be that 
there are no breaks in the operation of natural 
law. Is this a principle with which a mind 
passive in the presence of the facts would 
inevitably be impressed? Is there so little 
chaos in the observed order of nature that the 

32 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

observer finds the thought of uniformity irre- 
sistible? The sun rises every day, to be sure; 
the seasons advance in a more or less orderly 
procession, and organic changes seem to take 
place according to a somewhat rhythmic ebb 
and flow ; but this is not all the story, by any 
means. Many events seem shot at us from a 
gun, the gun in the hands of a rather irrespon- 
sible sportsman at that. In the realm both 
of the organic and the inorganic the most 
unlooked-for events, apparently the most freak- 
ish occurrences, are continually happening. 
To go no further than the weather for illustra- 
tion, do the changes all suggest inevitably the 
uniformity of nature? The scientist might 
respond that a break in the connection as we 
see it does not mean a break in the continuity 
of the underlying law. He might point out to 
us that the earth might at any moment collide 
with a comet and be dissipated into gas in a 
fraction of a second. Here we would have 
the greatest imaginable break in the chain of 
events and no break at all in the underlying 
laws which govern cometary and planetary 
movements and the destructions through shock 

33 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

and heat. We reply, however, that we are not 
dealing with underlying principles evidently 
reached by an involved process of scientific 
reasonings, but with the facts as they report 
themselves to the so-called passive observer; 
and we say that in these there is not enough to 
warrant a claim that the principle of the uni- 
formity of nature is reached by presupposi- 
tionless observation. 

If the uniformity of nature is not always 
clearly discernible in the succession of events 
is it one of those self-evident axioms whose 
obviousness makes it folly to speak of them as 
assumptions? Hardly. For anything which 
we can see to the contrary, a cause might be 
followed now by one effect and now by another, 
and that with the circumstances precisely 
similar in the two cases. This might be true 
if the world-cause be thought of as either 
material or spiritual. If materialism is 
accepted we can hardly bind matter to act 
always in the same way under the same cir- 
cumstances unless we have some indubitable 
assurance to that effect, which under the 
circumstances could hardly be expected. If 

34 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

spirit is accepted as the world-cause our own 
inner experience would suggest to us that a 
spiritual cause might under similar circum- 
stances in two cases follow now one course 
and now another. For all we know a priori, 
the universe may be the disconnected, incohe- 
rent ejaculations of a mind staggering along 
under the law of association. 

What, then, is the truth about the uni- 
formity of nature? Just this : there is a meas- 
ure of observable regularity in nature. With 
the awakening of the intellectual spirit the 
regularity rather than the chaos is seized upon 
as expressing the deepest truth, and this just 
to satisfy an imperious intellectual need. 
Then uniformity is assumed even in the situa- 
tions most lawless in appearance, and the clue 
to the law sought for with a grim persistency. 
The mind will not have a lawless universe. 
The scientist proceeds with the principle of the 
uniformity of nature simply because he is 
bound to have it. He holds it because it satis- 
fies him. 

Assumptions, then, come out of the scientific 
temper. Assumption underlies not only the 

35 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

general procedure of the scientific thinker, but 
marks very definitely his dealing with many 
classes of specific facts. Suppose we have 
before us a body of facts about whose objective 
reality there can be no question and the only 
point at issue is as to the interpretation of 
the facts. Here are two scientific physicians 
contemplating precisely the same set of facts 
about a patient. Let us suppose that the 
examination of the patient has been complete. 
The doctors have all the facts obtainable. One 
doctor interprets the fact in one way and the 
other in another way, with correspondingly 
different recommendations as to treatment. 
One may pronounce the patient at the point of 
death, and the other may find nothing in his 
condition but what may be easily set right. So 
two scientists look upon nature. One pro- 
nounces nature to be acting in a way which 
calls for no improvement, while the other pro- 
nounces nature sick unto death. The differ- 
ence here is between the backlying assump- 
tions, assumptions which are all the more 
potent through the fact that they are hardly 
suspected by their holders. 

36 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

The above illustration has to do with inter- 
pretation of patent facts which cannot be 
doubted. If there is any chance for emphasis 
on the facts which support his thought we may 
find one of the doctors putting such stress 
upon the aspects favorable to him that the 
other facts are altogether ignored. If there 
is the slightest opportunity we shall find one 
doctor or the other going on to "pick and sort" 
from the facts. Then there is no limit to the 
conclusions that may be reached. The truth 
is that the scientific investigators in all 
spheres carry with them sets of intellectual 
tastes and appetites which are responsible for 
unconscious assumptions. The investigator 
may never have formulated his thought of the 
values of different kinds of truth, but he has 
a scale of relative values, nevertheless, whose 
subtle and unconscious force is incalculable. 
Take the one thought as to the significance of 
human life. If the specialist in any branch 
looks upon the higher spiritual interests of the 
true human life as of no consequence, or as of 
so little consequence, for example, that the 
system of material things is not to be looked 

37 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

upon as in any way secondary or subsidiary, 
we shall know about what to expect. We shall 
at least have a different result from that of 
the believer in the inherent value and dignity 
of the human soul. 

The force of this something which we call 
the spirit of the investigator is indeed marvel- 
ous. We are all inevitably under its influence. 
Who of us could be brought to believe in 
witchcraft as an explanation of any facts? 
Evidence enough might be produced. Evi- 
dence enough was produced in another day to 
convince impartial and learned judges that 
witches had been at work. We have discov- 
ered no facts which make the existence of 
witches an impossibility. Still, we do not 
believe in them and we will not believe in 
them. The intellectual life has so enlarged 
— we are so under the sway of a new set of 
intellectual demands — since the day of witch- 
craft that we will not reopen that case; and 
this is about all we can say. Or take the 
matter of spiritistic communication with the 
dead through "mediums" as it is put before 
us to-day. We must all admit that the great 

38 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

difficulty before the believer in spiritualism 
is to get us to listen to him. Our atmosphere 
is against him. It may be an arid atmosphere 
begotten by scientific hostility to the belief in 
the realm of the unseen, or it may be the foggy 
atmosphere of doubt as to the persistence of 
soul beyond death, or it may be the cloudy 
atmosphere which prefers to have some things 
left in mystery, or it may be the storm-laden 
atmosphere of wrath against previous impos- 
tors. Whatever the cause, the task before 
the member of the Society for Psychical Ke- 
search is to create a friendly intellectual 
atmosphere. 

In all our actual reasoning very few ques- 
tions are settled by strict evidence. Habits 
and expectations and prejudices play the 
decisive part. In his subjection to these influ- 
ences the scientist himself must abandon all 
claim that his method is strictly without 
assumption. The scientist cannot shake him- 
self loose from this essentially human charac- 
teristic of reasoning simply by passing beyond 
the laboratory door. It would be as impos- 
sible for him to carry on his investigations in 

39 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

an intellectual vacuum free from all passional 
influences as for him to live without air. He 
carries swarms of assumptions with him — 
assumptions, too, which he is at no pains to 
adjust with the conflicting assumptions of 
other specialists — and he is surrounded by 
an atmosphere which makes it necessary for 
him to rely upon unconscious assumptions at 
every step of his way. 

We can go further and say that the scientist 
depends upon assumptions, conscious or uncon- 
scious, so completely that in many instances 
these determine what facts he is to discover. 
The scientist does not go into the laboratory 
with a mind passively waiting for the facts 
to unfold themselves. The inductive method 
does not by any means consist in a mere 
chronicling of observed phenomena. We may 
well believe William James when he says that 
the impartial passionless investigator is the 
veriest duffer. To be sure, the student may 
stumble now and then upon a fact laden with 
immense suggestiveness, or, sailing, like Co- 
lumbus, across an unknown sea, he may by 
merest accident catch a glimpse of the moving 

40 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

light which reveals the nearness of land ; but, 
making all allowance for exceptions, we have 
to declare that science has its strength not in 
a colorless impartiality, but in a passionate 
prepossession and prejudice and demand. To 
borrow a hint from Walter Bagehot, we must 
find the forcefulness of the inductive method 
to lie in the suspicion that certain factors are 
"guilty" of certain results. The scientist 
shadows the suspected forces and hunts for 
evidence against them. Of course, there are 
many factors against which a particular accu- 
sation will not hold, but the failure to bring a 
case at one place will only lead to a livelier 
tracing of clues in another direction. The 
scientist is really nature's detective, and the 
whole mental coloring which grows out of his 
experience as an investigator comes in deci- 
sively to the interpretation of each detail. He 
is looking for something in particular, and his 
whole course of action is based on the assump- 
tion that that something exists and that it can 
be run down and caught. Columbus did not 
expect to discover America, but he expected 
to discover something in particular, and he 

41 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

would never have sailed if he had not been 
driven by the force of unverified assumptions. 
When enough facts have been secured to 
transform the general and perhaps vague 
expectation into a carefully formulated the- 
ory, the theory itself enters the investigator's 
mind as part of the assumption with or from 
which he works. He then knows all the more 
definitely just the result at which he expects 
to arrive. There is abundant search to-day 
for facts confirmatory of the theory of evolu- 
tion. The evolutionist knows pretty well what 
he is looking for. He suspects a realm of 
nature to be guilty of events which will lend 
aid and comfort to the current doctrine. He 
lays snares for these accomplices and decoys 
them into the desired revelation. If the miss- 
ing links are ever all found, and the progress 
upward shown with no step left untraced, it 
will be because the scientist has known just 
what to look for. The scientist no more thinks 
of discovering facts in general than the 
inventor thinks of making machines in gen- 
eral. Each strives at something definite — the 
inventor at a submarine boat or a flying 

42 



OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST 

machine, and the scientist at a new planet or 
a new microbe. Scientific certainty is largely 
the satisfaction of an imperious demand. It 
is not merely a matter of the objective facts. 
Some facts are ignored, others given an em- 
phasis out of all proportion to their apparent 
significance. The scientist of all men ought 
not to say that he never exercises the right of 
intellectual eminent domain. What is that 
"constructive imagination" of which the 
scientist makes so much but an inner discern- 
ment sharpened by insatiable scientific crav- 
ings? 



43 



IV 

THE OBJECTIONS OF THE 
EVOLUTIONIST 

At this point the evolutionist appears, pro- 
fessing to be in hearty accord with much that' 
we have been trying to say. He thinks, how- 
ever, that he could say better what we have 
evidently been aiming at. His test of truth 
is survival, or utility, or adjustment of inner 
relations to outer relations. He demurs 
against our insistence upon the subjective ele- 

* 

ment in scientific thinking, and declares that 
his results are reached by simply reading off 
the teachings which are upon the very face of 
the system of things. 

We on our part express the most cordial 
good will toward the evolutionist. We do 
wish, though, that evolutionary terms had a 
more definite meaning than any we can find 
from the writings of their interpreters, so that 
we could really find out just how much agree- 
ment there is between their thought of sur- 

44 



OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST 

vival and utility and adjustment and our idea 
of life-giving power as a test of truth. The 
historic fact seems to be that Darwin and those 
of his day started a great thought movement 
which is yet moving and which has seen enor- 
mous changes since its first announcement. 
The catchwords and even the fundamental 
viewpoints of the early statements have long 
since met such modification that they can 
hardly be looked upon as the same now as 
in Darwin's time. The doctrine of evolution 
itself has experienced about as much evolution 
throughout its career as anything which it has 
attempted to describe. 

We cannot allow the evolutionist's claim 
that his results have been reached simply by 
reading off a process. The evolutionist has 
had the advantage of great inner mental 
pressures. There could hardly be a more 
marked instance of the power of a subjective 
element in shaping theory than the spell which 
even the word "evolution," hazy as it is, has 
cast upon the mind of the past two genera- 
tions. All sorts of sciences, from the study of 
rocks to the study of religious experience, 

45 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

have been subjected to all sorts of treatment 
to bring them into line with the supposed 
demands of evolution. 

If we look closely for the secret of evolu- 
tion's spell we can find it not only in the posi- 
tive successes of the theory in various depart- 
ments of objective science, but also in the satis- 
faction which it promises to forceful inner 
necessities. At the very outset the long 
stretches of time which the theory calls for are 
attractive. Just as the Copernican system 
brought a kind of intellectual gratification by 
furnishing more space beyond us, so evolution 
has served us by putting more time behind us. 
We are pleased to think that our pedigree 
reaches back so far, even if we cannot point 
with lofty pride to the earliest marchers in the 
evolutionary procession. Then, the passion 
for orderliness which is a part of our intellec- 
tual equipment is ministered to by the system 
which marshals so much into ascending series. 
If we fall to reflecting upon evolution as a 
satisfaction of the passion for orderliness we 
may well wonder how much of what we think 
given by the facts is really so given. Of course, 

46 



OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST 

similarities in the various forms of life around 
us make it possible for us to classify the forms 
into species, but a good deal of the making 
and unmaking of species plays around our own 
instinct for classification. In nature there is 
really no such thing-in-itself as species. There 
are individuals, more or less alike. We put 
the class term on the individuals so success- 
fully that we often speak as if the class term 
stood for some actual reality in the outside 
world. Now, we would not minimize the dif- 
ferences which make it possible to put men 
and horses into different classes, but still we 
must insist on the largely subjective char- 
acter in much of the evolutionists' manipula- 
tion of species. 

Moreover, the evolutionist has on his side 
the insatiable craving for simplicity. He 
promises a formula which will be all-inclusive 
— and has not the world waited long for such 
a formula? We come here upon a curious 
feature of evolutionism. The evolutionist 
would have us believe that in the world out- 
side of us the movement is from the simple 
to the complex. The charm of his theory, on 

47 



KELIGIOUS OEETAINTT 

the contrary, is largely in the simplicity at 
which it arrives. His things move toward the 
complex but his thought moves toward the 
simple. When we look at the simplicity we 
find it to be a simplicity which the mind has 
forced into its objects, or which the mind has 
reached by ignoring the complexities. The 
primal slime may have looked simple, but if 
it was really simple nothing would have ever 
come out of it except simple slime. To get 
beyond slime we have to have something more 
than slime. The complexity which must have 
been introduced into simple slime to make it 
more than slime would have been the essential 
factor. How we progress by ignoring this 
factor for the sake of the simplicity is a little 
hard to see except by remembering that the 
simplicity comes from a mental demand. 

We have no need to go further in this direc- 
tion. All that we aim to show is that the 
doctrine of evolution is so dependent upon 
mental prepossessions and passions that the 
evolutionist thinker ought to be on his guard 
lest the theory play a trick on himself. It is 
especially easy for the evolutionist to come 

48 



OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST 

under the deceptive power of words. This is 
true also in his emphasis upon the various 
tests of truth which he finds in his theory. 
Utility as a test of truth sounds well, but 
does the evolutionist mean by it what we do, 
namely, largeness and fineness of life? Is the 
useful to include also that which gives satis- 
faction to life apart from the objective conse- 
quences involved? A word too about the sur- 
vival of the fittest. Can we make much use 
of mere survival as a determining factor in 
our theorizings? The mere fact of survival 
is not always decisive, but the biological 
expression does help us to see the vital char- 
acter of the process. Much nonsense survives, 
and it is a good deal like the vermiform 
appendix in its survival. That is to say, it is 
so deeply lodged in the social mind that only 
a perilous surgical operation can get it out. 
Sometimes the patient dies, not because of the 
loss of an important organ in the removal of 
an intellectual survival, but because vital proc- 
esses had to be disturbed in order to get at 
a harmful survival. Nonsense survives and 
manages to complicate itself with good. Then 

49 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

the phrase about the correspondence of inner 
relations to outer relations. We like this 
phrase much, only we wish to see the evolu- 
tionists follow more closely the lead of those 
of their brethren who recognize the power of 
mind to do more than passively reflect the out- 
side conditions. We should like to see the 
doctrine lay more stress on the deliberate and 
purposive adjustment of material situations 
to spiritual needs. The evolutionist, however, 
does good service in letting us see that the pre- 
sumption is with the views which reach farth- 
est into the past. We do not have to subscribe 
to this or that particular phase of evolution- 
ism to see that in general the fact that a belief 
has lasted through the years is an indication 
that there is a truth at its center. Some evo- 
lutionists ha^ve hardly been consistent with 
their own doctrine in their ruthlessness 
against old views, especially old theological 
views. In spite of excrescences and atrophies 
here and there, these views survive often be- 
cause there is something nourishing at their 
heart. The evolutionist should give more 
encouragement to the theologian who tries to 

50 



OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST 

find if there is not some method to-day of tak- 
ing the truth in the old views and giving it 
more appetizing and nourishing statement — 
and some method by which we can distinguish 
the mere survival from the fit survival. 

There is a type of evolutionist who looks 
upon the new as the best putting of truth 
simply because the new has back of it the 
longest period of development. This man may 
have much to say about the Zeitgeist, and feels 
that the voice of a time is not only a voice of 
the time but the voice of the past back of it. 
Very often this is true, but we have to be on 
our guard against accepting as final truth an 
ephemeral fancy of the moment. The social 
organism is as truly subject to mere whims as 
the individual organism, and we have to dis- 
tinguish between the morbid craving and the 
healthy appetite. 

We acknowledge our indebtedness in a gen- 
eral way to the evolutionist. We must demur, 
however, against his putting of the test of 
truth and against his claim that his system is 
free from subjective elements, and we have 
some suspicion of his technical phrases. On 

51 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

the whole, we think we would better stick to 
our own test of truth — namely, the ability to 
satisfy the fullest and highest life of the whole 
man. We have no doubt that many mean this 
in the use of evolutionary terms, but so many 
do not that we would better keep clear of "the 
survival of the fittest" and other like expres- 
sions. 



52 



THE OBJECTIONS OF THE FORMAL 

LOGICIAN 

By this time the a priori logician feels that 
he must file protest. He points out to us that 
the mind has direct insight into truth on its 
own account; that the mind which pretends 
to any kind of philosophic worthiness pro- 
ceeds from certain truths w T hich it sees as 
necessarily true to others which it concludes 
to be true by the most careful and exacting 
logic. The road is the highway of apriorism. 
The method is deductive. The great and all- 
sufficient instrument is the syllogism. This 
other method which we have suggested with 
our phrases about spiritual eminent domain is 
as loose and inconsequential as any such meta- 
phorical argument is apt to be. 

We accede to a measure of force in the posi- 
tion of the apriorist. The mind does see some 
truths as necessarily true. When such a 
method as we are trying to expound is ad- 

53 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

vanced there are always some who claim every 
thing for it and who insist that even a priori 
truth, so called, is nothing but the long-used 
assumption which the prehistoric thinkers, if 
they had really been thinkers, might have 
recognized as assumptions. We have no 
patience with such rash desire to rule out the 
a priori as really a priori. Of course, what 
may be a priori and self-evident to one mind 
may be grasped only after a long course of rea- 
soning by another mind; but the apriorist is 
right in insisting that the mind has direct 
insight into some propositions as necessarily 
and inherently true. It would be very hard 
indeed to make any normal thinker believe 
that the proposition that things which are 
equal to the same thing are equal to each other 
does not rest on the mind's own power to see. 
Eemember what was said at the beginning of 
this essay. We are insisting upon the satis- 
faction of the entire life as a test of truth. 
We do not intend to ignore the mind's own 
distinctive interests. We make assumptions 
in the pursuit of religious truth and we ven- 
ture out upon these assumptions. If the 

54 



OBJECTIONS OF THE POEMAL LOGICIAN 

assumptions violate the mind's own in- 
sights — if the conclusions are logical con- 
tradictions — we shall not have reached that 
satisfaction for which we search. By our 
own principles we shall be compelled to look 
in other directions. The final test of the 
truth is the satisfaction which bears witness 

of itself. 

This, however, must be a satisfaction of the 
entire life— and here we begin to part com- 
pany with the rationalist. The rationalist for- 
gets that the formal logical principles play 
very little part in real life. In the spheres 
of mathematics and mechanics and in some 
branches of physics the a priori method will 
do very well, yet even here the a priori princi- 
ples are often most powerful in holding before 
the mind an ideal of sun-clear, self-evident 
system which the mind pursues unrelentingly. 
The apriorist feels that at the center all must 
be logic, and he works passionately for that 
center. He is driven by an intellectual need. 
He forgets, however, that life is more than 
logic, and that there are other driving neces- 
sities besides the formally logical. 



RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

If the upholder of the strictly a priori 
method thinks that the syllogism is the chief 
force in the creation of the philosophic systems 
which have laid hold on the minds of men he 
is far from complete mastery of the truth. 
Some systems have indeed been severely logi- 
cal, but others which have come to very wide 
vogue have hardly been logical at all. We 
have to concede large historic effectiveness to 
the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, for ex- 
ample, in any consideration of the thought 
movements of the last forty years. If we look 
for the secret of this force in any superior 
worth of Spencer's system from the stand- 
point of its logical validity we shall soon find 
ourselves at a good deal of a loss. There are 
about as many contradictions per chapter in 
First Principles as could well be found in any 
production of the human mind making any 
claim to intellectual respectability. Yet the 
unmistakable pointing out of the incongruities^ 
and inconsistencies had not for a long time the 
slightest effect in shaking the strength of the 
Spencerian system. The reason was that 
the system, with all its glaring faults, satisfied 

56 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FORMAL LOGICIAN 

the demand of the time. The discoveries in the 
realm of natural science, the weariness with 
the old rationalistic dogmatisms, the feeling 
that many statements of religious truth were 
worn out led to an acceptance of the Spen- 
cerian system, contradictions and all. The 
system fell in with certain desperate needs — 
needs which were so glad to get hold of any- 
thing which seemed at all likely to satisfy 
that they kept off for a long while any really 
close logical scrutiny of the new system; or 
rather they kept the critics from getting an 
effective hearing. 

Instances like this help us to see that the 
real force in shaping a philosophy is not 
"pure" intellect, by any means. The will, and 
not the intellect alone, is to be considered as 
the compelling force even in philosophy- 
making. We learn not merely by sitting down 
and thinking, but also by doing. The great 
convictions arise out of life — they are the 
expressions of the demands of life. A change 
in a philosophic system does not necessarily 
mean that thinkers are becoming more logical. 
It may mean that they are doing better living, 

57 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

rather than better thinking. We repeat that 
we are not trying to discount the importance 
of strictly logical procedure. Such procedure 
is all-important in its own sphere. We do 
insist that the logical faculty, however, is more 
an intense* and ravenous appetite than a cold 
and exact machine, and that the strictly 
logical powers win their greatest triumphs in 
what they insist upon having. They cast 
aside system after system in the ruthless 
demand for what is rationally faultless. We 
insist, moreover, that the very passion of the 
logical appetites to seize and hold for them- 
selves everything in sight — and out of sight, 
for that matter — is a tendency which has to 
be met and satisfied by demands of the life- 
centers which lie outside of the field ruled bv 
the syllogism. Men are not only intellect, but 
feeling and passion. The passionate and 
affectional and aesthetic aspects of our lives 
make their imperious demands on the will, 
and the will assumes whatever beliefs seem 
most likely to quiet these various demands. 
At times the will seems to be satisfied with any 
sort of compromise that will keep the peace, 

58 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FOKMAL LOGICIAN 

and at another seems to yield to some one 
imperious claimant as against all others. The 
successful claimant is seldom pure logic. 

We have no desire to raise metaphysical 
scruples or quibbles, but we call attention to 
the fact that strict metaphysical procedure 
can go only a little way without assumption. 
Suppose I start from myself and try to find 
my way to anything beyond myself by strictly 
and exclusively logical procedure. Of course, 
I may think that the laws which I find by 
reflection on my own consciousness will inevi- 
tably put me in possession of facts outside 
myself, but do they? How can I get to the 
world of things without assumption? Com- 
mon sense conceives of the world of outside 
persons and things as indubitably there and as 
reported infallibly in sense, but there are too 
many people living under the power of griev- 
ous hallucination for us to place absolute reli- 
ance upon the human senses. Our own senses 
often deceive us, and one deception takes the 
senses out of the grade of infallible witnesses 
as to outside fact. We are not dealing espe- 
cially, though, with the reports of sense. We 

59 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

are rather asking the strict rationalist how he 
would deduce an outside world from the con- 
tents of his own consciousness. The truth 
seems to be that the mind projects the outside 
world rather than deduces it. We do not 
deliberately assume an outside world by a 
lengthy and involved process of reasoning, but 
the process is akin to assumption, nevertheless. 
We project our own thought upon the world, 
and we have to do so. We say that the thought 
of questioning the outside world is nonsense, 
but that does not mean that we can deduce the 
world. By constitutional necessity the mind 
thinks an outside world in terms of mind. The 
question of abstract infallibility of the senses 
does not arise. If we had to stop to reason 
through as to whether every man we meet is 
an illusion or not we should never get ahead. 
We must get ahead — this is the driving force 
in philosophy as in everything else. The prin- 
ciples of the apriorist are of immense help in 
clearing up tangles, but they are not the driv- 
ing forces even in philosophy. The philos- 
ophies come out of the great intellectual needs. 
The needs declare themselves, and the deduc- 

60 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FORMAL LOGICIAN 

tions attempt to bring order into what the 
needs seize. 

This discussion would be incomplete with- 
out at least a word of reference to those who 
call themselves pragmatists. By pragmatism 
is meant that the test of truth is to be found 
in its usefulness — in its practical consequences 
when applied to the actual problems of our 
life. The test is the test of practical success, 
and the supreme question is, Will it work? 
The pragmatists have very little patience with 
self-consistency of the formal logical type as 
a test of truth, for a lying system might be 
formally self-consistent and a logically flaw- 
less system might not have value enough to 
hold title to a place in reality. "By their 
fruits ye shall know them" is looked upon as 
having worth not only as a test of persons but 
as a test of beliefs as well. If a belief promises 
anything the pragmatist says: "Ask not for 
its pedigree or for its certificate of good stand- 
ing from the professional logicians and system- 
inspectors. Simply try the thought and see 
the practical result." 

It can readily be seen that this system is 

61 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

open to grave charges of incompleteness. 
True, some have tried to make pragmatism 
explain everything, even the mind's grasp on 
mathematical axioms, but the attempt is far 
from successful unless the word "practical" 
is widened beyond its ordinary significance 
and made to include the interests which we 
have been accustomed to look upon as wholly 
theoretical. If pragmatism is to be defined 
in such a way as to include the satisfaction 
of a mind contemplating advanced proposi- 
tions in high mathematics and astronomy 
and physics and chemistry, where these 
studies have no relation to practical life, 
we have a use of the word "pragmatism" 
which is strained and unusual. Suppose we 
test the doctrine of the pragmatist that only 
the useful is true, in a very simple way. 
We live in a world of persons as well as 
of things. It may well be that nothing of my 
personal self is useful from the standpoint of 
the pragmatist, or it may be that there are 
spheres of activity in which I live which are 
beyond and apart from those which are of use 
to the pragmatist. Has the pragmatist, then, 

62 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FOKMAL LOGICIAN 

exhausted all the truth about me when he has 
taken account of the phases of my life which 
are useful to him? He may reply that he has 
all the truth about me from his standpoint, 
but the best part of me may not be visible from 
his standpoint. Of course, others may see me 
from different standpoints, and I may know 
myself with peculiar intimacy, but all the 
viewpoints together may not give a result for 
which "useful" is the best characterization. 
As it is with the individual, so it mav be with 
the world of things. If the pragmatist thinks 
that he has exhausted the truth of the universe 
by concluding that only so much of the uni- 
verse is true as can be used he would seem to 
have missed the best of it all, unless he falls 
back upon that strained use of the word "prac- 
tical" suggested above. This criticism is 
especially pertinent in view of the fact that 
the foremost pragmatist in America and the 
foremost pragmatist in England both hold to 
a pluralistic view of the universe. According 
to both thinkers we have all existed in con- 
siderable independence from eternity. If this 
kind of personalism is final philosophy the 

63 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

knowledge of persons would seem to be about 
the sum of knowledge. Yet it would be hard 
to make this knowledge useful on any strictly 
pragmatist basis. 

Another word for this system has been sug- 
gested as better than "pragmatism." The 
word is "humanism." Let the practical con- 
sequences be enlarged so as to include all that 
has to do with a real human interest, and we 
have what we want, we are told. In that realm 
of great importance where we may believe if 
we will, the humanist would have us under- 
stand that the mind advances by assuming 
whatever truth it feels itself to need; that it 
holds fast to this truth so long as the concep- 
tion seems to satisfy. When the conception 
will not satisfy, when the juice has been 
squeezed out of it, the mind reaches for some- 
thing else. The humanist would allow us to 
enlarge the practical consequences of belief 
to the extent necessary to any such theories 
as we must have in religious thinking. Hu- 
manism enables us first of all to insist that 
in the consequences the whole man must be 
taken into the account. We are not to have 

64 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FOKMAL LOGICIAN 

a result which will satisfy merely the intellect 
or the aesthetic or emotional sense alone. The 
whole man is to be taken as a unit. Human- 
ism has done good service in showing the part 
of the sub-intellectual and extra-intellectual 
and super-intellectual elements of our lives 
upon the strictly intellectual. This influence 
will explain why it is that the mind will some- 
times, indeed often, hold beliefs which can 
be shown to be faulty from the strictly intel- 
lectual standpoint. The mind is a unit and 
yet is not all one thing. The heart and con- 
science and intellect must be brought to some 
sort of agreement, and the result is that the 
belief which holds the whole life sometimes 
seems to stand for a sort of compromise 
among the mental members. The whole of the 
life must be satisfied. 

The word "humanism" too is happy in that 
it gives play for the great catholic experiences 
of man. In the matter of religious belief we 
must not be swayed too much by conceptions 
which would seem never to be fitted to take 
hold of the great heart of man. It may be 
that these conceptions may not yet be such 

65 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

that men can take them, but they must have 
the elements that make for catholicity. 

Again, the word "humanism" provides for 
the human as we see it in the highest lives. 
What are the demands of these lives? Allow- 
ing for the apparent contradiction between the 
demands of the "universal" heart of man and 
of those separate lives that tower above their 
fellows like mountain peaks, we still have 
room to claim that the race is to be judged by 
its best products, and that the demands of 
these are to be taken into account in estimating 
the worth of a particular conception. 

After all this help from the term "human- 
ism" we have to pronounce finally, however, 
that the aid has been largely in the suggestive- 
ness of the term itself. The principal expo- 
nents of humanism thus far have spent much 
time in trying to erect that which can be only 
a method for reaching truth into a system of 
philosophy on its own account. They carry 
their principle so far that they will hardly 
allow the mind to see anything as necessarily 
true. Their attacks on the self-evident char- 
acter of the axioms are uncompromising. 

66 



OBJECTIONS OF THE FORMAL LOGICIAN 

More than this, they entangle their system 
with a sort of pluralism which leaves every- 
thing at rather loose ends. There is nothing 
in their view which will satisfy the craving for 
unity which is part of the furnishing of the 
human mind. More even than this, at least 
one leading humanist makes the material uni- 
verse so plastic in the power of the individual 
persons that it is hard to see how he escapes 
making the persons the outright creators of 
the universe. All this can be understood as 
rebellion against and reaction from the self- 
sufficiency of the rationalistic absolutists, but 
such rebellion fails to recognize the driving 
force of logical passion back of the absolutists, 
mistaken and extreme as their systems may 
have been. While expressing our gratitude 
to the pragmatists and humanists for their 
splendid emphasis on the extent to which per- 
sonal needs and will-strivings are the compel- 
ling force in the creation of beliefs, we have 
to leave them with the remark that they have 
become so badly entangled with dubious sys- 
tems of metaphysics that their work has to 
be read very critically and accepted with con- 

67 



EELIGIOUS OEETAINTT 

siderable discount. When they make the satis- 
faction of the mind's own power to know the 
test of truth, as they must do in certain realms 
of mathematics, and then call this the satisfac- 
tion of a practical impulse, we feel that a play 
with words is going on, and that there is little 
difference between such doctrine and the doc- 
trine of the formal apriorist. 



68 



VI 

THE MORAL SENSE 

At this juncture the believer in the categor- 
ical imperative breaks out upon us. However 
the case may be as regards the formal logician, 
he declares, we must not forget that we are 
beings of conscience, that in the inward 
monitor we have a voice which speaks infalli- 
bly. We may often be in doubt as to what is 
true, but we need not be in doubt as to what is 
right. In short, we have to meet the objections 
of the moralists, who maintain that we have 
in the commands of conscience an intuitively 
recognized standard to which we must con- 
form. This infallible standard must have far- 
reaching bearings on the problems of theology. 

The discussions which have arisen in recent 
years largely in connection with the evolu- 
tionary hypothesis have provoked a good deal 
of question as to the absolute infallibility of 
conscience. We have been shown that many 
of the convictions which are now firmly part 

69 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

of the moral understanding of the race were 
at least not originally the deliverances of an 
oracularly infallible monitor. Some of them 
are customs which have received increasingly 
the sanction of the social groups to such a 
degree that they now seem direct utterances of 
the moral reason. Other moral laws which 
now seem intuitive were reached after long 
and uncertain processes of debate. Moreover, 
the history of these ideas not only stands 
against their being such utterances of an inner 
oracle as the intuitionalist would have us 
believe, but the variation of standards among 
different classes of people is also significant. 
What may appear to one people the height of 
villainy may seem to another the height of 
virtue. Still more, the actual problems of 
our daily life do not bear out the thought 
of a technically infallible inward guide. A 
tramp stands at my door. The obligation is 
upon me to treat him aright. But what is 
right? Is it right to give him money, or to 
send him away empty? Suppose even that 
I am dealing with my own son. He asks a 
certain favor of me. Shall I grant it, or shall 

70 



MOEAL SENSE 

I refuse? The inner impulse to do right 
may throw no light on this particular ques- 
tion. Then the larger questions of business 
come before me. I may believe just as truly 
as anyone else that I ought to do right, and 
I may be striving just as earnestly as any- 
one else to do right, but the desire throws no 
light on the question as to whether I shall shut 
down a branch of the factory or hire more 
workmen, or as to whether I shall raise or cut 
wages. And out beyond still lie the vaster 
questions of social welfare. The statesman 
most deeply desiring to do right may get no 
light from his desire as to whether to go to war 
or to keep the peace ; and so on and on through 
all the list of issues which the statesman has 
to confront. 

The possibility of thus debating every ques- 
tion which has a moral side has led many in 
our own time to doubt if there is any distinc- 
tively moral feeling as such. Conscience is 
a sort of development of the fear of social 
censure. We have no sympathy with such a 
view, but we do believe that moral feeling 
alone cannot be looked upon as infallible in 

71 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

the sense in which the intuitionalist uses 
infallibility. The moral feeling is peculiar to 
itself. It is a part of all real life and the 
crown of life, but it alone does not settle par- 
ticular problems. In all our theorizing we 
must not forget that we are dealing with a 
living organism, and that the whole organism 
must be considered. The organism as such 
does not thrive on abstract infallibilities, or 
on infallibilities of any other kind. It has 
living needs which it satisfies after the manner 
of life. The moral nature is not a monitor 
deciding as an infallible judge, but a source 
of vital power which insists that the moral 
interests shall be preserved at all costs. The 
decision as to what the moral life calls for 
in a particular situation may be another 
matter. The moral life says "March," but 
does not always prescribe the direction of the 
march. The moral purpose demands of our 
total life that it shall determine what is best 
in a particular set of circumstances. Thus it 
comes to pass that in one set of circumstances 
the moral impulse itself determines us. We 
cannot tell why we move in a certain direction, 

72 



MOEAL SENSE 

but we move in accord with the demands of 
moral insight. There are some situations in 
which the only safety is in immediate action 
as soon as the question is raised. We are in 
a sense morally lost if in some crises we stop 
to debate. At other times we are equally lost 
if we do not stop to debate. In some cases we 
are to rule out the question of expediency and 
in other cases treat the question of expediency 
as if it were alone important. Moreover, we 
cannot tell beforehand just how to act in one 
situation or another. For a man to lie under 
ordinary circumstances or even to think of 
lying, is to fall under the condemnation of all 
good people. Suppose, however, the circum- 
stances are not ordinary. In such circum- 
stances even the best of people divide on the 
question as to whether a lie is unjustifi- 
able. In dealing with enemies in war, with 
outlaws, with persons who have no right to the 
truth, with sick people, there is possibility for a 
large amount of debate as to the justifiability 
of an untruth. It is distressing, of course, to 
have to raise such questions as these, but we 
raise them just to indicate that infallibility 

73 



KELIGIOTTS CERTAINTY 

"under ordinary circumstances" may not be 
an infallible kind of infallibility. No, the 
moral realm is exceedingly complex, and no 
rule can be found which will serve as more 
than a general statement. We should do right 
and live according to the Golden Eule, but the 
right and the Rule carry with them no infalli- 
ble directions as to what to do in the concrete. 
They give us the order to march but do not 
furnish us with a map of the country. At 
times they do not even tell us what is east and 
what is west. And life goes on in the concrete. 
After we have spoken thus about the moral 
forces we hasten to repeat that we put them 
first among the factors which make for the 
progress of religious thinking. Only we do 
not treat them as abstractly infallible. We 
would prefer to speak of their inevitability 
and their inexorability rather than of their 
infallibility. The terms which we suggest are 
life terms. If we were to attempt any state- 
ment at all of the moral problem we would 
say that the moral aim is really toward the 
highest and fullest life. The moral impulse 
moves on the assumption that life is so to be 

74 



MORAL SENSE 

lived and ordered as to lead to the satisfaction 
of the best in us. Moral pressure demands 
that even the earthly conditions shall if neces- 
sary be made over to satisfy the demands of 
the highest life. The impulse does not work 
with any definition of life in hand, but in par- 
ticular circumstances it raises the moral ques- 
tion and puts all the mental faculties on the 
search for a solution. The moral impulse does 
not insist that the life is to be withdrawn from 
the present world, but it will not hear to sub- 
mitting to the forces of the present to the 
exclusion of higher interests. The moral im- 
pulse insists on making even the physical con- 
ditions such that the higher life can be more 
easily attained. As another has said, it seeks 
to make anything like criminal industry 
unprofitable. We move on the assumption 
that obedience to the moral impulse will put 
the race into harmony with its environment, 
but the adjustment results not through mold- 
ing the race to the environment but through 
molding the environment to the race. The 
moral impulse, we repeat, does not deal with 
abstractions, but is one of the great driving 

75 



'■ KELIGIOUS OEETAINTT 

forces in the life that now is. We may not be 
able to define the moral life, but we cannot 
define any form of life, for that matter. We 
can recognize the moral life when we see it. 
We can discern the moral impulse at work 
in the abolition of slavery, for example; and if 
we had been present when slavery was first 
established we might have seen a moral 
impulse at work in the new system. Enslav- 
ing the captives of war was a step forward 
from slaughtering them. To-day the moral 
impulse calls for the betterment of all the 
conditions of human living. Just what better- 
ment is depends upon the report of all our 
faculties brought to bear upon actual needs. 
Though tastes and appetites are not abstractly 
infallible, yet they are the great forces in push- 
ing life along. We can no more tell what 
betterment will be in advance than we can tell 
what any life-craving will call for. It is not 
too much to say that the moral impulse is the 
impulse of the entire life rightly ruled, mov- 
ing on toward higher and fuller life, and yet 
we profess to be as helpless to make any com- 
pendious statement as to what the right is in 

76 



MOKAL SENSE 

general, or the higher life is, as we are to 
describe life at all. In actual situations the 
whole life makes the adjustment which gives 
the increased satisfaction. 

After we have thus spoken of the force with 
which the moral impulse rules the present life 
we must show how it proceeds on certain 
assumptions as to the realm of the unseen. 
Since the time of Kant men have understood 
pretty clearly the force of the moral will in 
seizing and holding as assumptions the ideas 
of God and freedom and immortality even 
though the assumptions may be unconscious. 
The will to do right limps along rather help- 
lessly if there is no moral governor of the 
universe. We insist upon God because we 
have too much of a vacuum if we leave him out. 
The feeling that we ought must take on the 
force of a divine personal command if we are 
to feel its full power and dignity. So with 
freedom. We cannot demonstrate that we are 
free any more than we can prove by infallible 
logic that God exists. For all that we know 
to the contrary, everything that we think may 
be the outcome of determined forces. Our 

77 



RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

conviction that we are free may be, equally 
with the conviction that we are not free, the 
product of a force personal or impersonal 
which chooses to make sport of us. We cannot 
tell by formal logic whether the universe is 
the creation of a sportsman or not. It is pos- 
sible to believe that we are puppets jerked 
about by a fun-lover, so far as formal logic is 
concerned. We will not believe this, however. 
Our moral sense will not endure such belief. 
If science cannot prove that we are free we 
believe in freedom, nevertheless. We take 
freedom because the moral life demands it. 
The beliefs in determinism or fatalism thus 
violently ousted may raise a great outcry 
about violated logical rights, but we will not 
heed the outcry. So also with the belief in 
immortality. The demand for immortality 
arises not out of selfish desire to live for- 
ever, but out of a demand that the moral 
interests shall not be disregarded and out of 
the recognition of the worth of moral person- 
ality. In these days too we demand immor- 
tality as a field for adequate moral service. 
We desire to have our friends live on that we 

78 



MOKAL SENSE 

may serve them, and we desire immortality for 
the opportunity of moral service. The desire 
for immortality will last in society as long 
as the moral will lasts, and not much longer. 
Of course, there are morally high-toned indi- 
viduals here and there who remain true to 
lofty considerations of duty after they have 
abandoned faith in immortality, but such per- 
sons are often carried along by the impulse 
of morality bequeathed to them by the past 
beliefs or by the atmosphere of their time. 
The moral result of the surrender of the belief 
in immortality is not to be judged so much 
by the immediate effect on the life of the man 
who has surrendered the belief as by the long- 
run effect on the man whom he has trained not 
to believe in immortality. By their fruits ye 
shall know them. The fruits must include the 
disciples. 

More than this still, the moral impulse criti- 
cises and improves the beliefs of the theolo- 
gians. Take the three beliefs which we have 
mentioned — God, freedom, and immortality. 
The moral impulse demands that the idea of 
God shall be moralized. God shall be above 

79 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

all trace of moral infirmity. Some views of 
God have made him overanxious about moral 
insignificances, but as fast as the race comes 
to better insight more is expected of God. The 
glory of our moral daring is that we make 
bold to put the heaviest obligations upon God. 
As soon as we discover a moral obligation we 
put it upon God. As soon as we find a new 
largeness of life we insist that it must be part 
of the life of God. We make very free with 
the Almighty, but we do so out of a moral 
impulse. The moralization of theology is al- 
ways a great need and a great triumph. We 
insist too upon the best thought of freedom. 
Freedom is not an arbitrary lunging about in 
the dark. It is the self-ordering of the life. 
As soon as we discover a new moral law we 
insist that we must freely bind ourselves with 
it. We know that arbitrariness and selfishness 
lead to spiritual slavery, and that obligations 
put upon one's self as fast as they appear lead 
to liberty. We will have freedom even in the 
face of that great realm of law of which science 
makes so much. We even declare that the law 
is only an elaborate instrument for the use of 

80 



MOEAL SENSE 

freedom. We demand also a moralized idea 
of immortality. Immortality as mere endless- 
ness is not enough. Whereas the argument as 
to the quantity of eternal life, so to speak, was 
once the main point with theology, the ques- 
tion now comes more and more to do with the 
quality of the immortal life. We cannot 
believe in an eternity of passivity. We must 
hold fast to the possibility of a field for large 
moral activities with an environment more 
favorable to the growth of moral purpose. 

We might continue indefinitely, but we have 
said enough. All the doctrines of the Church 
come under the review of the moral under- 
standing. New doctrines, or practically new 
doctrines, are fashioned because of the de- 
mands of the moral life. This life, however, 
does not act as a technically infallible stand- 
ard. It acts rather as what it really is, a life 
pushing and insistent with all the demands 
of life. It creates certainty by producing con- 
viction rather than by uttering oracles. 



81 



VII 

THE GREAT OUTSIDE FORCES 

Within the past few years careful investiga- 
tions have given fresh impressiveness to the 
dependence of the higher faculties of man on 
the lower. We see with new vividness how 
closely right thinking is bound to right living 
and how inevitably an unhealthy brain makes 
for an unhealthy thought. We have learned 
anew also how inevitably the race relies for 
its higher life upon the very earth itself. The 
geographers and the economists have helped 
us to understand that before there can be 
favorable thinking about God or about man 
there must be a material basis at least meas- 
urably favorable. It would be folly to deny 
that the Christian conception of God is the 
most valuable thought-possession which the 
Esquimau can have, but it would be absurd 
also to maintain that a people living in a night 
six months long and subsisting upon blubber 
could enrich the Christian idea of God by 

82 



GEEAT OUTSIDE FOKCES 

carrying it out to its largest implications. We 
see in the theologies as we have them the reflec- 
tion of the ideas of the times in which the doc- 
trines received their first statement. Some 
phrasings of the idea of God have made God 
appear as a ruler in an absolutist scheme of 
government. Such statements can often be 
traced back to thinkers living in a period when 
the physical and economic conditions made 
absolutism in earthly government a necessity. 
The heavenly government was drawn in terms 
of the earthly. In a day of ampler individual 
initiative, on the other hand, there is move- 
ment toward democracy, and the freer scope 
for the individual increases his sense of respon- 
sibility for his own salvation. Thus on 
through the list. The creeds are made on 
earth. The pictures of the New Jerusalem 
show a resemblance to the old Jerusalem. The 
earth suggests more and more for the under- 
standing of heaven. The moral achievements 
of the race have been mightily helped by phys- 
ical necessities. New worlds have been dis- 
covered not merely because men have found 
their way through to them in pure scientific 

83 



KELIGIOITS CERTAINTY 

research, but because the cramped quarters 
of the old worlds have made necessary the 
discovery of the new. Just as the welfare of 
the individual man is based upon a friendly 
physical condition, so the higher life of the 
race depends in a measurable degree upon the 
earthly lot of the race. The right attitude 
toward the great basal physical needs of the 
race helps us to understand better how the 
higher achievements become possible. 

Now, some have been so far swept away by 
this truth that they have been compelled to 
pronounce the higher manifestations merely 
the reflections of the lower. They have made 
the lower of primary importance, and in fact 
some have conceived of mind as so bound up 
with the material accompaniments as to have 
no power of initiative on its own account. 
They have missed the fact that the mind has 
itself discovered the limitations under which 
it itself has moved, and that the mind has de- 
liberately taken hold of the earth to make it a 
new earth. When the brain specialist shows 
us how thoroughly the mind depends on the 
nerve tissue, and how pressure on this or 

84 



GREAT OUTSIDE FORCES 

that square inch of the brain surface will 
derange the entire rational life, we wonder not 
only that this is so, and marvel not only at 
the brain which is thus important, but also 
stand awe-struck at the mind which can thus 
read the secret of the brain. The secret has 
been grasped not by any passive mirroring of 
the brain fact in consciousness, but bv careful 

7 t/ 

and persistent study on the part of the mind. 
When the student of the physical forces which 
affect the career of the race tells us of the vast 
conclusions toward which the patient study of 
the facts points, we marvel at the patience 
which can collect the facts and the skill which 
can interpret them. The historian reproduces 
the life of the Middle Ages for us so exactly 
that we see that there were well-marked phys- 
ical causes at work which made it absolutely 
necessary for the broken line of communica- 
tion between Europe and India to be reestab- 
lished, but that ought not to prevent our see- 
ing the enormous skill and power of the minds 
w T hich conceived of the world as round and the 
tremendous daring of Columbus, who sought 
the East by sailing west. We recognize more 

85 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

and more the dependence of social and reli- 
gious progress on the improvement in trans- 
portation facilities, especially. Good roads 
are indispensable in the development of civili- 
zation not only because they open up new 
markets, but also because they provide new 
possibilities of broadening and humanizing 
intelligence and sympathy. Now, we would 
make a serious mistake if we looked upon the 
movement toward macadam and railroad and 
steamship as merely the outcome of economic 
forces working on largely passive human 
instruments. The imagination is at work in 
the building of the road. The dream is not 
merely of new markets. The history of the 
construction of the strategic roads in the 
United States, for example, is interesting read- 
ing in this respect. Of course, the Cumberland 
road and the Erie Canal and the Pacific Rail- 
road were built through business necessities, 
but not through these alone. The appeal to 
the popular mind in every case touched broader 
issues and swept along with a kind of imagina- 
tive fervor. Dreams of the conquest of the 
West, of national centralization, of "manifest 

86 



GEEAT OUTSIDE FOECES 

destiny/' played a mighty part. Take the most 
important material work before the nation 
to-day, the construction of the Panama Canal. 
How absurd to say that business considera- 
tions alone are making for the completion of 
this stupendous enterprise! Financiers even 
question as to whether the canal will pay, at 
least for many decades to come, as a strictly 
business venture. Spiritual forces are at 
work. The appeal for a more firmly cemented 
nationality is one. The prophecy of the large 
place which this country is to occupy in the 
affairs of the world is another. The vast spell 
of the Pacific and the Orient is another. Down 
under all, the more powerful because so dimly 
recognized and so hard to state in exact terms, 
is the feeling of the moral obligations of this 
nation toward the nations which lie beyond 
Christendom. The religious element may be 
hard to detect, but it has its effect, neverthe- 
less. All the larger spiritual elements are 
tinged with the religious. The highway is 
being seized and held and completed for the 
large interests of Christianity, and will serve 
those interests. We not only avow that phys- 

87 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

ical conditions have shaped our speculations 
about God and heaven, but we record our 
wonder also at the religious persistency which 
insists that the physical forces of every age be 
made to render their tribute to the spiritual. 
We must not lose sight of the power of a 
Christian ideal to take its place among the 
actual working forces of the world's life. We 
must not think of Christian views as mere 
creations of the time. They are in their day 
creators of their time and of the times to come 
after them. Physical and economic laws must 
have worked together, of course, before there 
came to be the marvelous cathedrals which are 
the delight of every artist. There must have 
been developed the tools which could shape the 
stone and the skill which could pile block on 
block. There must have been collected the 
money to pay the workmen. Moreover, the 
lines of the cathedrals must have been drawn 
to meet the necessities fixed in the nature of 
things, but all these forces together do not 
explain the cathedral. Not even the genius of 
the artist explains fully. We must make some 
provision for the mystic religious impulse 

88 



GEEAT OUTSIDE FOECES 

which demanded that it should thus find appro- 
priate expression in the lasting foundations 
and soaring arches. 

To drop down to a plane so much lower that 
it may seem that we have taken the flight from 
the sublime to the ridiculous, let us think of 
some of the requirements of the Eoman Cath- 
olic Church as to the food which the faithful 
shall eat. Fish must be the reliance on Fri- 
days and through some stated seasons, let us 
say. Now, we admit that it is of great impor- 
tance to the fishermen and to the fish dealers 
to have the requirement as to fish stay in force, 
but we can hardly believe that the requirement 
as to fish-eating rests in any large degree upon 
the demands of the fish market. A religious 
ideal is present, and that ideal is one of the 
forces driving the fleets of the fishermen to the 
Banks of Newfoundland and holding them 
there through fog and storm. No, the religious 
spirit is not a mere passive reflection of ma- 
terial necessities, no matter how important 
these necessities may be. Too many wars have 
raged in which the religious motive has been 
decisive for us to believe that religious ideas 

89 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

are not active agents in the historical life of 
mankind. 

We are drifting a little to one side, however. 
What we started to say was that the mind of 
man to-day seeks to curb and control the phys- 
ical factors because of the importance of these 
factors for the higher life of man. Some 
massive necessities we cannot overcome. Let 
us adjust ourselves to these as best we may. 
There are improvements which we can make 
even in the earth itself. Let us make the 
improvement. The earth is not an end in 
itself, but an instrument for righteousness. 
The material forces which aid righteousness 
can be improved by the help of mind. Phys- 
ical conditions are indeed mighty, but the 
Christian ideals themselves are mightier still, 
especially in their demands upon the material 
forces for help. The idea of God and of 
man is not a mere reflection, though the phys- 
ical basis must be right before we can have 
the right idea. The conception of God, 
therefore, moves forth to make the condi- 
tions right. The highest conceptions must 
have the right of way. If the present environ- 

90 



GEEAT OUTSIDE EOECES 

uient will not allow us to think the highest 
concerning God the environment must be 
worked over. Economic laws indeed mold 
politics and social ideals and artistic creations, 
but in the name of God and man Christianity 
emphasizes the sway of higher law which shall 
make the industrial law and all laws subser- 
vient to the noblest ends. The Christian ideal 
is even attacking the geographical problem 
with insistence upon the need of tying the ends 
of the earth closer together that commercial 
contacts may make for spiritual contacts. The 
whole world must be purified for the sake of 
that better understanding of God and of our- 
selves which will come out of the cleaner life. 
We trust that we make ourselves clear. In 
an essay like this we must not minimize the 
force of the great outside powers in shaping 
the doctrines of Christianity. It requires only 
a superficial reading of history to see that the 
longest advances for theology have many times 
taken their start outside the theological realm. 
The religious consciousness assumes that in 
responding to the play of such outside forces 

it is not yielding itself to be made sport of by 

91 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

the underlying powers. Even where these 
powers seem to be the working of blind massive 
necessities we are to look upon them as instru- 
ments in the control of the fundamental spir- 
itual purpose. The recognition of the signifi- 
cance of these forces is not the abject sur- 
render of religion, but the regal glory of reli- 
gion, since religion dares to attack the uni- 
verse and make it better in the name of larger 
life, dares attempt even the regeneration of 
heathenism for the sake of bringing about the 
better understanding of God. The more com- 
pletely we recognize the vastness of the 
material necessities which mold nations, the 
importance of the economic and political 
forces, the pressure of the Zeitgeist, and so on 
and on through a long list, the more we have 
to wonder at the regality of that daring which 
can look these things in the face and then move 
forth to transform them. The formulation of 
the Copernican system is not the victory of 
matter, but the victory of the discovering and 
announcing mind. The significance of the sys- 
tem for Christianity is immeasurably vast, but 
the glory of Christianity immediately appears 

92 



GEEAT OUTSIDE FOECES 

in the power that forthwith picks up the astro- 
nomical distances as new yardsticks to meas- 
ure in part the long reaches of the might of 
God. Any alteration of the world makes for 
the alteration of Christianity. The greater the 
improvement in the world, the more surely does 
the Christian claim the altered system for the 
glory of God and men as that glory is taught 
by Christ. Christianity recognizes the signifi- 
cance of the outside forces for herself, and 
seeks to lay hands on them for her sake and 
for their own sake. 



93 



VIII 

THE CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS 
CERTAINTY 

Of more importance, however, than the out- 
side forces in shaping belief has been the actual 
experience of those who through the ages have 
constituted the real Church — the body of 
spiritually minded worshipers. The outside 
forces have been like the atmosphere surround- 
ing a body ; the Church has been the body itself. 
While there may not be enough in the figure 
of the Church as an organism to warrant an 
elaborate use of biological terms, there is 
enough to help us to see that the Church's 
acquisition of truth is a distinctly vital proc- 
ess. The Church does not reason her way to 
convictions by exclusive reliance upon the 
logical and speculative faculty. She finds that 
she must have certain intellectual territories 
in order to exist and forthwith moves into pos- 
session. This is to say, she makes assump- 
tions which seem necessary to the satisfaction 

94 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

of the religious needs. Having made the 
assumptions, she acts on the principle that the 
possession of the beliefs is at least nine points 
of the law and holds the beliefs until sufficient 
reason for doubt appears. If belief cannot be 
brought into harmony with the demands of 
the logical nature, or if there is manifest con- 
flict with facts, the Church must surrender 
or readjust her doctrines, but she throws the 
burden of proof on the attacking party. She 
is not a merely logical or metaphysical instru- 
ment, but an organism. Her beliefs are the 
expressions of her life, and are in turn 
expected to justify themselves in life. By their 
fruits even the doctrines are to be known. 
The Church's function in relation to religious 
certainty is not to pronounce in an artificially 
dogmatic way upon beliefs, but to show that 
the belief springs out of life and that it in turn 
fosters life. She does not produce certainty 
by declaring that this or that is true, but by 
nourishing the kind of life which will beget 
faith. In her great pronouncements her 
underlying aim has been a life-aim no matter 
how little she may have understood the real 

95 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTT 

situation herself. The formal logical reasons 
given, the appeals to history and to divine 
authority, cannot conceal from us the fact that 
the decisive certainty has been begotten and 
not made. The certainty has come from 
deeper springs than the leaders of a particular 
time may themselves have imagined. In the 
seizure of new territories by a nation there 
may be much citing of precedents and much 
marshaling of argument, but the determining 
historic fact is most often the pressure of the 
expanding life of the nation. If the particular 
reasons are overthrown other reasons will be 
found so long as the nation feels the stirrings 
to larger life, but if the inner pressure dies 
down no reasons will be found cogent. So 
with the Church. We do not accuse the spokes- 
men of the Church of any insincerity when 
we say that the formal reasons uttered for 
a belief may not be real at all. The real rea- 
sons may lie so deep that the spokesman 
himself does not suspect them. The Church 
arrives at beliefs by a process of assump- 
tion. She holds the beliefs as long as they 
satisfy. Her compelling aim is to satisfy 

96 



* 



CHUKCH AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

the demands of her total life. If a belief satis- 
fies she will hold to the belief as true until 
something more satisfying appears, and then 
she will surrender the old belief not as false 
but as less truthful than the newer view. As 
an organism the function of the Church is to 
take w^hat she requires for the demands of her 
life. This living seizure of beliefs as true is 
a great scandal to the merely technical logi- 
cians, but then everything living is a scandal 
to them. Such logicians would have the 
Church believe nothing except what is capable 
of demonstration by the syllogism, but the 
Church appeals to life as against the logicians 
and passes on. 

If we wish historic instances of the exercise 
of this vitality by the Church we may think 
first of the movement which ended by giving 
us the canon of the New Testament. As we 
read through the story of early Church life 
we are struck by the fact that the real mark 
by which the New Testament writings gained a 
place in the canon was their power to satisfy 
the demands of the spiritual life. Of course, 
there was appeal to tradition and citation of 

97 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

authorities by the fathers, but, after all, the 
decisive evidence was the ability of these writ- 
ings to minister to spiritual need. Books read 
week after week in the assemblies fostered a 
life which was itself a sure discerner as to what 
was holy Scripture and what was not. When 
we think of the lack of technical historical 
investigating tools in the day of the fathers 
we may well be thankful that a life instinct 
kept out of the Book apocryphal gospels which 
put forth claim to authenticity and pseudo- 
epistles which could furnish quite a plausible 
showing for apostolic authorship. The Church 
took what she thought she needed and threw 
the rest away. The more detailed historic 
investigation of later times has failed to reveal 
that she made any substantial mistake. 

We can see the same life interests at work in 
the process of creed-making. The great creedal 
statements of the Church and of the Churches 
have come out of life. They have not 
been manufactured in wooden, carpenter-like 
fashion. The phrases which may seem very 
lifeless to us now were once quick with the 
pulse of discussions of pulpit and market place 

98 



CHUKCH AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

and street. George Eliot is not untrue to his- 
tory when she makes the filioque clause part of 
a street discussion in Komola. If we come at 
all close to the debates of the Councils we find 
that the great organic necessities of the 
Church were the driving factors back of the 
most abstruse and abstract arguments. In 
dealing with the earlier statements of the 
doctrine of the Church we are very often apt 
to speak of these statements as fossils. Let us 
not make the mistake of estimating the power 
of the doctrine in its day by what we are 
pleased to call the fossil in our day. Let us 
remember that the hard, bony, logical struc- 
ture has survived but that the muscle and 
blood and nerve have departed. The hardness 
of the early statements of Calvinism may dis- 
tress us of to-day. We should not forget the 
power of that Calvinism when it was alive. 
It came out of the life and ministered to life. 
The boniness of the logic as we see it to-day 
ought not to dull our imagination to the 
solemn beauty and mastodonic force of the 
system when it was alive. So with every other 
creedal statement which has played any sub- 

99 



EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTT 

stantial force in the life of the Church — it was 
an expression of the life-needs of the time and 
ministered to the life-needs of the time. When 
such statements ceased to have force it was not 
because they were overthrown by technical 
argument. They perished as the mastodons 
of another geological era perished — the climate 
changed. We may be evolutionists enough to 
believe, moreover, that the Church was keep- 
ing so close to the truth of reality in this vital 
expression of her needs that there has been no 
creed of any historical significance but that in 
dying bequeathed some organ or some function 
for the organism which was to come after. 

This insight into the method by which the 
Church has advanced in seizing and stating 
truth for herself will explain why it is that she 
has often been apparently so indifferent to 
logical onslaughts upon her creedal state- 
ments. She has framed the statements not 
merely as logical utterances, though she has 
had in mind the satisfaction of a logical need. 
The utterances have been in a sense symbolic. 
They have been the language of life, language 

which has this for one of its charms, that it 

100 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

means more than it says. The beliefs have 
stood for phases of an underlying life, and 
sometimes the outward and formal contradic- 
tion have been only the signs of the variety 
and complexity of the life-factors at work. 
Just as unity and complexity, though form- 
ally contradictory, are experienced without 
a sense of strain or contradiction in the per- 
sonal life itself, so many creedal statements 
have been academically contradictory without 
really bringing the inner religious conscious- 
ness any sense of stress. Some phrasings 
of the belief in the Trinity and the Incarna- 
tion and the Atonement are to-day seen to 
be so self-contradictory that we wonder that 
men ever could have held them. It may 
help us to an understanding of the mind 
of another day as well as to a better state- 
ment for our own day to remember that the 
language was the expression of a spiritual 
organism trying to utter a marvelously full 
sense of life through language which broke 
down in the attempt. If we do not seem irrev- 
erent we may say that many creedal state- 
ments are more the ejaculations of a vast life 

101 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

than the ordered utterances of a school. The 
mind is not only expressing itself but is hold- 
ing before itself symbols of a reality which 
it knows to surpass the content of phrases, and 
is ever reaching for larger symbols. 

Something of this vital practical interest 
has appeared also when the Church has 
persisted in keeping to its beliefs in face of 
the attempts at revolutionary innovation. The 
superficial critic becomes very severe when the 
Church will not make an immediate surrender 
at some point where he has marshaled his 
conclusions invincibly. We shall qualify what 
we are now to say by a remark in a later sec- 
tion, but when we see how many trivial objec- 
tions have been brought forward in the name 
of logic we may be thankful for the instinct 
which has kept the Church voicing her beliefs 
even when she has seemed to lack a leader ca- 
pable of answering the logic. The one way to 
overcome the merely speculative intellect is 
to ignore it. We may call this proneness to 
ignore technical speculation the inertia of the 
Church if we will, but we need not be disturbed 
if our enemies even call it just ordinary every- 

102 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

day dullness. The dullness arises out of the 
fact that the Church, when she is performing 
her proper function, is dealing with the issues 
of life and is not responsive to the ingenuity 
and the smartness which mark the language of 
the logical fencers and jugglers. 

For still further historic instance of the 
method of the Church in the utterance of 
doctrine we may think of how the Church has 
come to some conclusions concerning herself. 
Some beliefs have come out of practical neces- 
sities. Understand, now, we are not so much 
trying to justify these beliefs as to explain 
them. Take the Roman Catholic claim to 
ecclesiastical primacy and papal infallibility. 
This doctrine has advanced through its suc- 
cessive developments by the pressure of life 
necessities in the Roman Church. The historic 
fact was, no doubt, that the position of Rome 
in the early Christian centuries made inevi- 
table certain practical problems and pointed 
the way to their solution. The Church at 
Rome took the primacy and found reasons 
afterward. The fundamental reason why 
attacks on the historicity of Peter's relation 

103 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

to the Church at Eome have so little weight is 
because the primacy of that Church did not 
rest on Peter. Peter was an afterthought. 
We do not charge the Church with insincerity. 
The fact was that in the progress of events it 
became necessary for the Church to take the 
leadership. For the leaders to conclude that 
the inevitable leadership was ordained of God 
was itself inevitable, and the further discovery 
of confirmation in the Scripture was almost as 
inevitable. In the doctrine of papal infalli- 
bility to-day the logic of the situation is not 
so decisive as the psychology of the situation. 
The psychology of the situation is just this, 
that multitudes of men — many of them very 
intelligent men — desire to have things settled 
for them. Without bothering themselves with 
the validity of the arguments for papal infalli- 
bility they are quite willing to treat the Pope 
practically as a court of last resort or final 
appeal. Those who do not feel the pressure of 
this necessity may not have stopped to consider 
that it is often practically very important to 
get a case closed, and that of two evils, keeping 
a case open and closing it in a wrong way, 

104 



CHUECH AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

closing it in the wrong way very often works 
the less practical harm. 

Before we become too impatient over the 
illogical character of such procedure it may 
be well for us to remind ourselves that other 
branches of society besides the Church move 
in the same course. Suppose one should 
imagine that the decisive factor in Webster's 
reply to Hayne was Webster's superior logic ! 
He would miss altogether the historic truth. 
That truth is that from the days of the adop- 
tion of the Constitution on through the suc- 
ceeding decades the North and the South had 
been growing apart. The North had devel- 
oped a type of life which made a broader idea 
of nationality necessary, and the South had 
remained nearer the condition of life which 
had been best supported by the doctrine of 
state sovereignty. Each orator was the expo- 
nent of a type of life. The war was between 
the two types of life. The views which states 
take of themselves, as these views are reflected 
in their constitutions, come out of life. They 
have to be flexible, at least in interpretation, 
because life is flexible. 

105 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY, 

In the great historic movements, then, 
the Church has seized whatever truth its 
growing life has craved, and has held this 
truth so long as the truth has justified itself 
in life. If we assume that the truth is the 
correspondence of our conception with the 
conception of the Mind which constitutes 
reality we have to say that the Church has 
moved on the principle that she has increas- 
ingly approximated to the thought of the Infi- 
nite Mind as she has thrown herself on the 
best assumptions in the confidence that these 
would not lead her astray. 

We now come to look for a moment at the 
function of the Church, or a church, for that 
matter, in begetting religious certainty in the 
mind of the individual. We must keep before 
us that the Church is but one factor of many 
working together to produce certainty in the 
mind of the individual. Still, it is possible for 
us to isolate this factor at least partially. 
When we thus look at the Church alone it is 
hard to resist the conclusion that the Church 
does her work best when instead of pronounc- 
ing arbitrarily and authoritatively she sets 

106 



CHUECH AND KELIGIOTJS CERTAINTY 

herself to beget the kind of life on which reli- 
gious conviction depends. She has a chance 
to throw around the child from birth the reli- 
gious influence. If any protest against this 
she can reply that she has as much right to 
prejudice the child in favor of religion as a 
nation has to strive to fill the earliest thoughts 
of the child life with a spirit of patriotism. 
She has in her power a large furnishing of 
those forces which lie outside the merely 
intellectual which are effective for evoking the 
religious spirit — the cooperation of art, of 
social relationships, the emphasis on historic 
continuity, the appeal to the imagination 
through attempt at world-wide conquest. 
Even that crowd contagion which some psy- 
chologists think to be so evil in the effect of 
religious appeals has its legitimate uses. 
Crowd contagion, of course, may be evil, but 
crowd contagion must be judged as any other 
contagion is judged. It is bad to "catch" 
disease, but not bad to "catch" good health. 
All depends on what is caught. 

The Church can recognize even more clearly 
than she has yet done the dependence of belief 

107 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

on the right attitude of will and the deepening 
of certainty which follows the right life. She 
ought, in short, to look upon herself as a labo- 
ratory for practice in righteousness, for out of 
righteousness comes that abiding and increas- 
ing certainty of the presence of God which 
nothing can shake. More important than the 
work which the Church actually accomplishes 
is the reaction of the work upon her workers. 
The Church need not busy herself with formal 
arguments as to the existence of God if she 
can get men to assume the existence of God 
and live as if he were real. She can get along 
with fewer arguments about the divineness of 
Christianity if she can prevail upon men to 
assume that Christ is the way, the truth, and 
the life, and to walk therein. She can largely 
dismiss the formal arguments about immortal- 
ity if she can persuade men to begin to live 
as if they were to live forever. Out of such 
practical assumptions come the abiding con- 
victions. Moreover, with the right emphasis 
on the common-to-all as a test of belief she 
can keep beliefs from running off into aberra- 
tion and triviality. 

108 



CHURCH AND EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

We say "with the correct emphasis upon the 
eommon-to-all" advisedly, but we must now 
say that the faults of the Church as an agent 
in begetting religious certainty have largely 
come from a failure to recognize the impor- 
tance of the individual. The problem before 
the Church here is substantially similar to the 
problem before democracy — the problem of 
allowing right scope to the individual. The 
Church has for its glory the production of 
towering individuals just as democracy has 
the production of towering individuals for its 
glory. The Church, like democracy, however, 
has sometimes shown an inability to appre- 
ciate the specialized efforts of the individuals 
who have arisen in her own centers, and has 
often been unwilling to allow them sufficient 
room. There are some s&ftrices which the indi- 
vidual has to render for the Church which the 
Church as a mass cannot well render herself. 
There are some regions of spiritual exploration 
about which the Church can become aware 
only as the exceptional individual acts as 
pioneer, 

.We have (said that in all her seizures of 

109 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

belief the Church must aim at the satisfaction 
of the total life of mankind. She sometimes 
errs through indifference to facts. As hinted 
at in an above paragraph, she sometimes reads 
history and passes upon it to suit herself, as 
the Roman Catholic Church has more than 
once done to support her claims. When some 
exact student points out the discrepancies she 
is sometimes slow to acknowledge the correc- 
tion, and to put her claims upon a better 
foundation. She sometimes ignores facts and 
turns fiercely upon the scholar who dares speak 
out in the name of scientific accuracy. Of 
course, the Church is justified in putting some 
facts to one side as not yet understood, as for 
example, the dark features of the physical sys- 
tem which make against the doctrine of the 
goodness of God. tfe may put these cruel 
aspects to one side as not yet understood, but 
it would be folly to ignore or deny them. 
There are some facts, however, which the 
Church must face, and she must listen to the 
individual leaders as they teach her how to 
face them. M . A Eoman Catholic recently de- 
fended his Church for condemning Galileo by 

no 



CHUKCH AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

the plea that the Church did not deny Galileo's 
discoveries as scientific achievements, but that 
she denied the theological consequences tied 
up with the departure from the older astron- 
omy. With the best intentions she was 
forced to deny the astronomy for fear that an 
acceptance of the astronomy would be mis- 
understood. In straits like those of the days 
of Galileo a wise pilot is the only salvation — 
if the Church will follow him. A pilot, how- 
ever, is an individual. 

Again, the Church must find room for the 
individual thinker who attempts to find more 
and more logical expression for the belief of 
the Church. We have said some hard things 
about the logician. Let us say now that we 
have had in mind the type of thinker who 
imagines that strict logical procedure is every- 
thing. We urge that in her endeavors to 
satisfy the religious demands of men by her 
seizures of thought-positions the Church must 
make provision for the satisfaction of logical 
needs, for while the logician is not a discoverer 
he can do much to put in order what has been 

discovered. The Church has long since seized 

in 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTT 

the main highways of the truth, the highways 
which lead to the kingdom, but the logician 
can straighten the curves and reduce the 
grades. He may even upon occasion put up a 
sign of "No thoroughfare" to the right hand 
or to the left. Civilization's pathways across 
the continents were not discovered by the 
scientific surveyors. The hunters and traders 
had found the trails and the passes before the 
surveyors arrived; the savages had trudged 
the same paths before the traders appeared; 
and the wild beasts had worn them smooth 
before the savages came. Civilization, how- 
ever, needed the fine skill of the surveyor in 
leveling and straightening the way for the 
later comers. Mankind has from the begin- 
ning been traveling along the line of well- 
known instincts and aspirations and assump- 
tions. The trained thinker can give immense 
service in straightening and broadening the 
Church's right of way. For the Church to 
draw a sword on such a servant, unless he is 
clearly trying to land her in a bog, is verily 
a strange procedure. Even if the guide is 

headed for the bog it is not necessary to draw 

112 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

the sword on him. All the Church has to do 
is to decline to follow. If a surveyor makes 
a mistake now and then it is better to correct 
the mistake by encouraging a re-reading of the 
instrument than to smash the instrument and 
to banish the surveyor. 

Once again, there are high spiritual attain- 
ments to which the individual saint has to 
show the approach. There are some men with 
a gift for religious insight which amounts to 
positive genius. Out of their saintliness the 
Church may make its longest strides forward. 
Out of their fine awareness of the divine comes 
a general deepening of the sense of the divine 
throughout the Church. We are to look upon 
the Church as the Body of Christ and to allow 
our minds to play around the suggestiveness 
of the figure. We think of the Christ as in 
actual touch with the world through the lives 
of his followers. We see the significance of 
the deeds of the disciples for the larger revela- 
tions which come from Christ. In the light of 
the figure we think of the significance of the 
healthy, normal processes for spiritual revela- 
tion; for the soul cannot transmit a perfect 

113 



RELIGIOUS CEKTAINTT 

revelation through an imperfect body. Even 
the most matter-of-fact practical activities of 
the Church have significance for the beliefs of 
the Church. The modern psychologist empha- 
sizes the importance even of the hand for the 
unfolding of the perceptive powers of the 
mind. The reach and grasp of the hand cor- 
rect and enlarge the effectiveness of the eye. 
The modern educator informs us that manual 
training has meaning for intellectual develop- 
ment — enforcing as it does the mutual adjust- 
ment of theoretical and practical. So those 
more material agencies which may be called 
the working hands of that Church which is 
the Body of Christ are educative forces for the 
formulation and correction of doctrine. 

Above all, we think of the individual saints 
as the glory of the Body, if we may so speak, 
the delicate spiritual tissues which seize the 
finer impressions of the Spirit and make them 
living impulses for all the members. The 
Church learns as a body lives, through finding 
itself in possession of appetites by which it 
is moved forward to seize what it craves. The 
process is vital throughout. The development 

114 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

lies along the line of improvement of the fine- 
ness of the fiber as well as through increase 
of its size. The fineness can come only as the 
Church searches out and holds fast the individ- 
ual who shows any promise of leadership. 

We do not consider it necessary to say more 
about the value of the leadership of the indi- 
vidual for the Church. The value is obvious. 
The individuals are the feelers who to-day 
reach ahead for the truth which to-morrow will 
be wrought into the organism of the body of 
believers. That the prophets of one generation 
are stoned by their contemporaries comes out 
of the tenacity with which the slower-moving 
mass holds fast to the teachings of the prophets 
of the preceding generation. The persecution 
of the prophet of to-day is really a sign of the 
effectiveness with which the prophets of yester- 
day proclaimed their message. The prophets 
who to-day are persecuted will be likewise the 
authorities of to-morrow. This is not much 
consolation to the persecuted, perhaps, but it 
is the teaching of historical fact, nevertheless. 
The individual reaches on ahead and takes the 
risks of the advance. The Church would never 

115 



KELIGIOITS CEETAINTY 

arrive if the advance truth-feelers did not 
perform this function. 

We wish to add, however, before we leave 
this section that the power of the individuals 
does not come largely from formal and 
abstract statements. The influence which 
makes for conviction is nowhere shown to be 
more thoroughly extra-intellectual than in 
the relation of the effective teachers to their 
disciples. Of course, now and then the bare 
formulation of a truth in strictly intellectual 
terms has weight, but this is not apt to be 
so in the realms which we are considering. 
Formal statements may suffice for mathe- 
matical sciences, but they are not enough else- 
where. The abstract idea may have been 
stated in formula after formula, but it does 
not become really cogent until it is forged into 
expression by some man whose force is more 
than purely intellectual. There must be the 
touch of fire which can warm the heart and 
touch the imagination. There must be that 
sense for efficient form which can shape the 
statement into power as the arrow-maker 
shapes a stick into the fast missile or the lens- 

116 



CHURCH AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

maker shapes cold glass into a fire-starter or 
a telescope, or the shipbuilder draws the oak 
or steel along the lines which make for the 
swift cleaving of the waves. 

When we study the control of the genius 
over his pupils we are convinced that the con- 
trol even of logicians is largely personal. Not 
only the logical system as such is effective, 
but much more effective is the personal 
warmth which the interpreter communicates 
to the disciples as he comes face to face with 
them. We hear the founders of thought- 
schools spoken of as inspirational. The real 
founders have indeed been inspirational. 
Tone and gesture and smile and manifestation 
of personal interest in the welfare of partic- 
ular students — all these have been dynamic. 
We hear too much about impersonal forces 
as shaping the mind, as if these acted entirely 
by themselves. History is more than "geo- 
political" or economic. It is the interplay of 
persons, and the distinctive marks of personal 
charm in a teacher must not be left out of 
account as fashioners of beliefs. 

Above all, in Christian education the con- 

117 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

vincing energy is incarnation. If the man's 
belief is noticeably above the man the belief 
fails in carrying power. If an important belief 
is projected forward from an important life 
the belief may be incalculably powerful. 
Incarnation, however, is really making a word 
into flesh, to be seen and handled. The life 
is the teacher rather than any formal articula- 
tions which fall from the lips. The life will 
make good the shortcomings in the doctrine, 
and without the life the most consistent doc- 
trine is of limited avail. 



118 



IX 

THE BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS 
CERTAINTY 

It requires no very extensive argument to 
show that the idea of the Bible as a literally 
and mechanically infallible religious authority 
lacks compelling force to-day. On the other 
hand, it would not be hard to show that the 
doctrine of scriptural infallibility came orig- 
inally out of the life-needs of religious think- 
ing and that the doctrine served a religious 
purpose. For an earlier day the doctrine was 
an approximation to the truth and a step 
ahead. The only recourse by which the Scrip- 
tures could be preserved in a former time was 
to invest them with a sacredness which touched 
every letter. If it be objected that this was a 
step backward from the better understanding 
of the first Christian days, that the writers 
of the Scriptures themselves had no intention 
of claiming verbal infallibility for their letters 
and speeches and songs, we have to reply that 

119 



EELIGIOTJS CEETAINTY 

many historical steps forward seem at the first 
a step back. The first and immediate effect 
of heaping fuel on the fire may be to check the 
blaze. The acquisition of many thousands 
of believers for Christianity — believers who 
came practically all at once — made a task dif- 
ferent from that presented by the conversion of 
a few here and there in the earliest days of 
the Church. In the latter case the members 
who had personally known Paul could furnish 
sufficient commentary on his epistles for the 
new converts without help from any doctrine 
of literal infallibility. The convert could be 
given a degree of personal attention which 
would make superfluous an external authority. 
When, however, the converts came in hosts, 
and came too without any marked inner expe- 
rience, a new problem arose. The Scriptures 
were invested with a different sacredness, not 
by arbitrary decree of Church leaders, but by 
the unconscious demands of the people them- 
selves. Men in masses could not make the dis- 
tinctions necessary for the use of such a doc- 
trine of biblical authority as we could profit 
by to-day. When the Protestant Eeformation 

120 



BIBLE AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

broke from the doctrine of an infallible Church 
the demand for an external authority of 
another sort was all the more pronounced, and 
came out of the religious needs of the masses 
of the new Churches themselves. We repeat 
that we falsify history if we think of the 
doctrine of literal biblical infallibility as a 
cunningly devised instrument of religious 
leaders. The doctrine arose from the needs 
of the people themselves. The Bible was 
looked upon as literally infallible because the 
believers could not then live religiously upon 
any other view. They had to have such a view, 
and they seized it. We cannot explain the 
spread of a doctrine like that of biblical infalli- 
bility by calling it an artificial creation. The 
doctrine met a clamorous life-need of a former 
day. 

It will now, no doubt, seem to some that we 
have refuted our own argument. We have 
shown that the demand for the doctrine of 
literal biblical infallibility came of the reli- 
gious needs of the Churches, and yet we have 
already indicated our own view that the dogma 

of literal infallibility is not suited to our day. 

121 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

Is not this an admission that the demand of 
the Church is no indication of the truth of a 
belief which she has seized? In reply we avow 
that we have not held that a belief which the 
Church holds at any one time is of necessity 
absolutely and finally true. We do think of 
these seizures as in the main on the path to 
reality. We believe that we have to judge 
beliefs by their total inner and outer results. 
Truth does not consist in bare statement with- 
out regard to the character of the mind 
addressed. Statements of belief have to be 
judged by the impression they make. We can 
commit grievous mistake by thinking that we 
have discharged our whole duty to the truth 
by giving utterance to statements which 
satisfy merely ourselves. Truth is not re- 
vealed until it is understood. Truth is uttered 
not for the sake of articulating the air, but 
for the sake of quickening the mind to whom 
the words are addressed. A thinker may be 
so scrupulous in expressing his view as to be 
altogether false in the impression he makes. 
Judging the doctrine of biblical infallibility 

not by its formal statements — which, by the 

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BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

way, the holders themselves seldom pro- 
nounced satisfactory — but by its effect in its 
time, we have to say that in all probability the 
doctrine wrought an indispensable part in 
keeping alive faith in the Scriptures. We do 
not see how any other belief could have served 
the purpose. In that transitional period when 
the masses of the people began to have the 
questionings which mark the growth of intelli- 
gence the view began to be productive of harm, 
but even here it is possible to exaggerate the 
ill effects. We cannot in these days commend 
the view which would make the Bible an 
authority in such a sense that opening it at 
random would throw light on any and all 
problems. Still, the practical dangers of such 
a course are not so dreadful as we might think. 
Occasional damage would result from such 
unintelligent use of the Book, some foolish and 
ridiculous incidents might occur, but, on the 
whole, better have a man opening the Bible 
from a doctrine like this than not to have him 
opening it at all. The good in the Bible would 
have a chance even under such a theory, and 
this was the real aim of the doctrine of literal 

123 



KELIGIOTTS CEKTAINTY 

infallibility — to give the Bible a chance. 
Before we indulge in too severe criticism of 
the Church leadership which could tolerate 
and support the belief in the mechanical iner- 
rancy of the Scripture we would better reflect 
on the historic truth that, all things consid- 
ered, this doctrine in its time played a large 
part in saving the Scriptures. 

Emphasis on miracle as chief support of the 
authority of the Scriptures flourished more 
widely in that earlier day which in its philo- 
sophical constructions put God at a distance. 
Before our modern idea of the divine imma- 
nence became popular the signs of the presence 
of God most sought for were in the nature 
of miraculous interventions. Considering the 
state of thought in an earlier time, the reliance 
on miracle for the authority of the Scriptures 
was inevitable. In a deistic age the stress on 
the miraculous, no doubt, was beneficial for 
the preservation of the Scriptures. 

To-day the philosophic outlook is altered. 
We do not imagine God to be so completely 
above or outside of the world that he must set 
aside natural processes to reach us. Instead 

124 



BIBLE AND KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

of attempting to show how God can act by a 
natural method, many feel that the burden 
of proof is upon those who would have him act 
by any but a natural method. Those of us who 
in spite of the spirit of a time somewhat hostile 
toward miracles still keep place for them hold 
fast to miracles not as objective proofs but 
rather as fitting accompaniments of the spir- 
itual events which they attend. The belief in 
miracle thus rests on inner supports, and the 
opposition to miracle is an expression of a 
scientific temper. It would hardly be possible 
to convince anyone to-day of occurrence of mir- 
acle in scriptural times if such a one were not 
already open to the probability of miracle. 
Present-day acceptance of miracle grows out 
of unwillingness to surrender some spiritual 
values which are closely interwoven with the 
miraculous in the narrative. Both in belief 
and disbelief the inner attitude is decisive. 

The attitude of the large body of Christians 
toward miracles is determined not by their 
evidential or logical value, but by their spir- 
itual suggestiveness and symbolism. Here we 
have an explanation both of the willingness 

125 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

and the unwillingness to make concession. 
The Church in general seems willing to admit 
that some stories of miracles may be legendary, 
that others may be poetic forms of utterance, 
that others are narratives in which the pres- 
ence of God is emphasized to the neglect of 
the processes by which the will of God was 
wrought out, that others suggest the control 
of a lower law by a higher law, and so on 
almost indefinitely. Why, then, having yielded 
so much, will the Church not yield all and 
allow the miraculous in the Scriptures to be 
dropped out? 

As a matter of fact, even the most radical 
critic would likely object to casting out the 
stories of miracle from the Scriptures. He 
would explain the stories in one way or an- 
other and then keep them for their suggestive- 
ness. The main mass of the believers, while 
possibly indifferent as to the fate of this or that 
particular miracle, find so much of spiritual 
quickening even in many occurrences that can- 
not be explained as other than miraculous that 
they will not consent to the loss of lifeblood 
involved in too extensive a biblical surgical 

126 



BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

operation. For example, the Church to-day 
might feel no great reluctance to an elimina- 
tion of the extraordinary from this or that 
particular miracle of Christ, but she would not 
consent to such treatment of Christ himself as 
would take him from his place as the supreme 
miracle of the Scriptures. Christ as the incar- 
nate life of God is the real object of defense by 
the believers. If for spiritual purposes this life 
seems to call for miracle in the world of per- 
sons and things the miracle will be held fast as 
long as it serves the spiritual purpose — that is 
to say, as long as it ministers to the total life of 
the believers. 

By this time it may be that some one will 
again urge a demand considered somewhat in 
earlier pages, the demand that in scriptural 
matters the critic of to-day is final authority 
— that we may believe the Scriptures just so 
far as the critic allows us to believe them ; that 
the methods of historical criticism have so 
advanced in the past few decades that we have 
in them an instrument for finding the mean- 
ing and worth of the scriptural narrative such 
as the world has never before seen. 

127 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

Before we concede all of this we insist again 
upon the presence of the inner factor in shap- 
ing the methods of the newer criticism. We 
might mention many schools of biblical criti- 
cism. Of recent years the principles of evolu- 
tionism have been a deciding factor in deter- 
mining what was to be found in the narratives. 
We have to know, however, how much author- 
ity evolutionism itself has before we can well 
tell how much weight to give some pronounce- 
ments of the evolutionist critics. The passion- 
ate desire for orderly progress in the revela- 
tion of the truth of God is good, but our ideas 
of what order may be ought not to be allowed 
too much influence in saying that such and 
such ideas could not have appeared until after 
such and such other ideas. We are dealing 
with a complicated problem when we are deal- 
ing with a revelation from God to men. We 
cannot always be sure what the divine plan 
would call for at a particular crisis. Or we 
are apt to forget how the indifferent and dis- 
obedient wills of men can thwart a revealing 
movement. Moreover, the data are far from 
ample and the history is away in the past. For 

128 



BIBLE AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

these and many other reasons we should be 
critical of pronouncements which leap very 
far down into details. The distribution of 
two or three clauses in one sentence of the pres- 
ent record among authors of two or three dif- 
ferent centuries is always rather a dubious 
procedure, and cannot be taken very seriously 
except by those whose passion for theory is 
rapidly cutting them off from actual life proc- 
esses outside the study. 

A healthy sense of reality, however, ought to 
correct the overemphasis on the purely scho- 
lastic interests among the students and make 
the general contributions of recent scholar- 
ship among the most valuable which the 
Church has received. On the whole, the schol- 
ars have acted out of an impulse to make the 
Scriptures more life-giving than before. The 
last few decades have seen a veritable redemp- 
tion of some parts of the Scriptures akin to the 
redemption of arid lands. Just as the stim- 
ulus of increasing physical hunger has sent the 
scientists out to the waterless plains to devise 
some means of grain-producing irrigation, so 
the stimulus of increasing spiritual hunger has 

129 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

sent the scientific student of the Scriptures to 
hitherto unappropriated portions of the Book 
to see if some vital use could not be made of 
them* Thus through hitherto comparatively 
barren stretches of law and chronicle and 
prophecy a broad and fertilizing stream of 
historical understanding has been run, with 
the result that the Book is more life-giving 
to-day than ever before. Naturally in a proc- 
ess like this some wild work will be done, just 
as many a harebrained plan is devised for 
the reclamation of a desert ; but on the whole 
the result has made for larger spiritual food 
supply. The students have sought life and 
they have found life. 

The first mark of the newer understanding 
is just this, that the Book is shown to be more 
than ever a book of real life. It comes out of 
life and its teachings work back into life. 
Take the stories of the patriarchs in the early 
chapters of Genesis. These are not less divine 
when they are revealed as the outcome of a 
people's religious consciousness than when 
looked upon as a dictated report of long-past 
events sent down by the unmediated influence 

130 



BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

of the Divine Spirit. If the stories were told 
around the fires of shepherds and herdsmen 
and were thus passed on from father to son 
we can see very well how they have been made 
so vital in their lifelikeness and so laden with 
moral suggestiveness. Only the vital features 
could survive a process like this. Everything 
else would be dropped out. Or think what an 
advance has come with our understanding that 
the laws of the Hebrews were not imposed by 
fiat and all at once but were real expressions 
of the deepening insight of the people. So with 
the other factors in the biblical literature. 
The songs which we have in the Psalter mean 
more if they were national music, in wide cir- 
culation, than if they were the productions of 
a few geniuses no matter how highly inspired. 
The prophecies are more significant coming 
out of the pressure of national necessities than 
if they were chiefly miraculous predictions of 
far-distant events. The gospels mean more as 
recollections set down for a practical use 
than as the systematically prepared work of 
scholars. The epistles were written to meet 
needs begotten of the life of a particular time. 

131 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

They would not have meant anything for the 
people of their day, and very little for any suc- 
ceeding day, if they had not been written thus. 
Even the partition of documents among differ- 
ent authors, if the process does not run to rank 
absurdity, is of significance as showing how 
vitally interested men were in the religious lit- 
erature. The documents came out of life and 
they bore upon life. They were meant to be 
practical guides. History, law, song, gospels, 
epistles — all had immediate reference to prac- 
tical needs and aimed to help in actual crises 
of life. They were not only products of life 
but also producers of life. 

It is from the point of view which regards 
them as producers of life that we must 
approach the Scriptures as a religious author- 
ity for us of to-day. We see the Scriptures as 
the revelation of life. We shall speak of the 
authority of Christ later on, but we may say 
here that the Scriptures, taking them through- 
out their entire range as showing the kind of 
life which culminated in the Christ and the 
kind of life which followed the Christ, are to 
be regarded as normative and standard in that 

132 



BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

they give us the life as it sets toward Christ 
and culminates in him and follows after him. 
The authority is the authority of life itself. 
The force of the Scriptures is so distinctly 
vital that it catches us in its momentum and 
carries us along. When we seek for a better 
understanding of the Scriptures as to their 
authority we really have in mind the closer 
contact with the life there. The biblical stu- 
dent performs an invaluable service in helping 
the Church to see more and more clearly just 
what the life was, or rather is; for the char- 
acteristic of the Book is that above all other 
books it is throbbing with life. We do not use 
the Book most wisely by drawing certain ideas 
from it and by looking upon these ideas as 
authoritative. We do much better by allowing 
ourselves to be caught in the current of life in 
the Book and by yielding ourselves to be borne 
on with that current. Biblical theology must 
be studied, indeed, but biblical theology is not 
authoritative in the same sense that the Bible 
is authoritative. The Bible is filled with the 
life. We have to abstract from this life to 
consider the various problems of theology and 

133 



KELIGIOTJS CERTAINTY 

ethics and worship raised by the Scriptures, 
but every step in abstraction is a step away 
from the full and whole life which we find in 
the Scriptures. The abstraction is indeed 
valuable as helping us to a better understand- 
ing of the life, but the life is the standard to 
which we must ever return. 

The authority of the Scriptures is first the 
authority of a kind of life which we see set 
before us very clearly in the pages of the 
Book. The authority does not rest here or 
there upon isolated passages, but abides in the 
impression and impulse which the revealing 
movement makes upon our lives. The Book is 
to rule us not so much by giving us ideas to 
which we must subscribe or codes which we 
must follow as by giving us a life which takes 
its own course with us. The river of the water 
of life described in the last chapter of the book 
of Revelation is a fit symbol of the real power 
of the Scriptures. The Bible closes with this 
picture of the river proceeding forth from 
God and his throne. The truth rushes forth 
from the Scriptures with a marvelously vital 
energy to carry men along with it. The 

134 



BIBLE AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

authority is not the authority of a fixed stand- 
ard, but the authority of a vital stream which 
sweeps on irresistibly and inevitably. 

Coming to still closer quarters with the 
problem before us, we may say that the life 
which is in the Scriptures and comes forth 
from the Scriptures manifests itself by devel- 
oping a power of seizure in the name of life 
itself. The very peculiarity of the chosen 
people of Israel is the remarkable seriousness 
with which they took their religious conscious- 
ness. Even their material conquests are illus- 
tration of the propensity to seise in the name 
of spiritual eminent domain which is devel- 
oped by extraordinary religious fervor. The 
extermination of the Canaanites may not have 
been historically so bloody as we might 
imagine, but the attitude toward the Canaan- 
ites was an early indication of this power of 
the religious consciousness to insist on its own 
right to make material place for itself on the 
earth. 

We may find further illustration of the de- 
velopment of the power to seize in the name 
of religious consciousness in the work of the 

135 



KELIGIOUS OEKTAINTY 

more spiritual of the prophets. The prophet 
was first of all a man of his own time, speaking 
out of the needs of his time. Hardly any spir- 
itual daring in history can compare with the 
boldness which could put into the current 
politics of Israel the significance which the 
prophets saw there. The prophets dared to 
announce that the mighty power of Assyria, 
for example, was simply a rod in the hands of 
Jahveh. Imagine the amused contempt which 
such a conception would have aroused in the 
mind of an Assyrian if he had stopped long 
enough to think about it. The mighty bulk of 
Assyria a mere instrument for bringing good 
to a people of a despised outlying province! 
So with the attitude of the prophets toward 
Babylon and Persia. Cyrus had been girded 
by Israel's God without himself suspecting the 
fact. This boldness did not come out of any 
sense of material prosperity. The prophets 
were not filled with the wine of the excitement 
of victory. The greatest claims were made at 
the moments when the outlook for Israel was 
darkest. Israel must live as a spiritual force, 
and the prophet simply seized the assumptions 

136 



BIBLE AND EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

which he thought necessary. He saw a world- 
wide meaning in the value of a nation which 
to all outward appearance was itself insigni- 
ficant, and he claimed the future for that 
nation's religion. The time would come when 
the Lord's house would be established in the 
top of the mountains and all nations would 
flow into it by a kind of reversal of the laws 
of historical gravitation. The prophets dared 
believe what their spiritual impulses called 
for. We see very clearly that while the form 
of their prophecy was temporal and fleeting 
the substance, nevertheless, laid hold on high 
spiritual truth. 

In this connection we may point out that 
modern study has helped us to recognize some- 
thing of the daring of the prophetic schools in 
their dealing with Israel's past. We to-day 
see the narratives of Israel as documents in 
which history was written largely from the 
prophetic standpoint. The writers were not 
aiming at literal matter-of-fact exactness. 
Their very freedom in dealing with the tradi- 
tions which had come down to them is an indi- 
cation of the spiritual boldness of which we 

137 



KELIGIOTTS CERTAINTY 

speak. They read God into their narratives 
with marvelous determination. Looking back 
after the lapse of all these centuries, we have 
to say that they were right. They gave us nar- 
ratives which we see as more and more true at 
the same time that we become in some details 
more uncertain of them as records of abso- 
lutely literal matters of fact. A government 
report as to a fact is authority of one kind. 
The poetical or oratorical or inspirational 
treatment of fact is an authority of another 
kind — and of a higher kind. 

We repeat that the life which issues forth 
from the Scriptures develops certainty. We 
do not care to overelaborate our contention, 
but we may say further that this certainty 
which is developed throughout the Scriptures 
comes, in general, to its highest manifestation 
in the impetus which is revealed throughout 
the Book to higher and higher appropriations 
in the thought of God. Anthropomorphism is 
in any case a kind of tribute to the daring of 
the human mind — to the boldness which dares 
think of the divine in terms of the human. 
The Scriptures are altogether inspiring in the 

138 



BIBLE AND KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

extent to which they demand the best of God. 
If any new moral insight came to a prophet 
the insight was looked upon forthwith as a 
revelation of the character of Jahveh; and of 
course a new morality in the character of 
Jahveh led to a fresh dynamic for the 
moral life of the worshipers. The idea of 
God given in the Scriptures is fixed only in 
direction. Every deepening of the moral life 
leads to a better understanding of God, and 
the movement is on and up. The idea of 
God expanded till the whole earth was looked 
upon as his footstool and the highest lives were 
regarded as gleams of the life of Jahveh. This, 
in a word, is the authority of the Scriptures, 
speaking now in the most general terms — the 
Scriptures set the life toward thinking of God 
in the highest and holiest terms. They compel 
us to believe that everything high and worthy 
is to be found in God, that any unfolding of the 
human excellence is a revelation of the life of 
God. They impel us to claim the very best for 
God. 

Still, some one may say, this is but a method, 
after all, this seizing of conceptions and at- 

139 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

tributing them to God. How do we know, after 
all, that we have the truth? The answer is 
just the answer to which we are led by taking 
the Scriptures into our lives. , The life bears 
witness of the truth. We look upon truth as 
that which satisfies the entire life. If the 
life is satisfied the highest test for truth of 
which we know is met. The Scriptures deepen 
the life. They make the life ask for more, and 
they help the life to realize that this deepening 
appetite itself is a finer and larger revelation 
of the presence of God. It is open to the tech- 
nical logician to object to this argument, but 
this is the reasoning of life. Any food that 
satisfies the life is looked upon as worthy. A 
book which moves the life in the highest direc- 
tion must be looked upon as a great fact to be 
recognized and taken account of in the spir- 
itual world. The book is not an arbitrary 
standard but a producer of life. It shows its 
authority not merely by what it says but by 
what it does. It is authoritative as a life- 
factor is authoritative. 



140 



CHRIST AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

We come now to the theme of Christ and Re- 
ligious Certainty. For some the problem as to 
the authority of Christ presents no difficulties. 
Christ is the Prophet. We have only to read 
his words to know the final truth. He is the 
Priest. He has bought us with a great price, 
even the price of his own blood, and having 
bought us will not allow us to fall into error 
if we but trust him. He is the King. We have 
only to hearken to his commands and obey 
them. He is the Son of God, shown to be 
such with signs and wonders like the miracles 
and the Resurrection. There can be no appeal 
beyond the words set before us in the divinely 
inspired record, and the record is so clear that 
the wayfaring man need make no mistake. 
Multitudes have traveled along the pathway 
of this belief and have found rest unto their 
souls. 

But others have had trouble. They have 

141 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

been distressed by the questions which earnest 
and serious students have raised about every 
item of the accustomed statement of the 
authority of Christ. Christ is a prophet, but 
what, after all, did he say? Have we his 
words as he uttered them? Christ was called 
a priest, but how are we to conceive his priest- 
hood in such a way as to give him authority 
over our thinking? How are we to meet the 
objections to the doctrines of atonement? 
Christ was called a king, but in what realms 
does his authority really lie? Is his word 
literally binding for a world whose forms of 
thought are far removed from those of the first 
century? Christ was called the Son of God, 
but how are we to understand the words, and 
how are we to meet the modern scientist's 
objections to miracle and to the divine guar- 
antees which we have hitherto accepted as 
authenticating the record? 

It would be folly in the present writer to 
attempt a direct answer to these questions. 
The direct answer must come from the special- 
ists, from the historical and philosophical stu- 
dents who give their lives to mastery of the 

142 



CHRIST AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

difficulties of the Christian system, and who 
by great and worthy labors throw up a high- 
way for the divine over the hills and valleys 
of the intellectual province. The majority of 
us, however, do not travel far into that prov- 
ince. Is there no relief for those who are 
somewhat troubled as to the authority of 
Christ and yet who cannot make the journey 
in company with the intellectual specialist? 

We believe there is such relief. We believe 
that the relief comes through turning away 
for the moment from the formal argument as 
to the authority of Christ and through looking 
at the fact of Christ as an influence making 
for religious certainty. Every age must think 
its theological and philosophical problems in 
its own terms, and just at present we must 
repeatedly insist that the age in which we live 
is not busying itself so much with abstract 
arguments about authority as with emphasis 
upon the claim that certainty comes out of life 
as the result of a life process. Formal and 
mechanical authority means less and less, and 
vital and experimental certainty means more. 
We think of authority not so much as a final 

143 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

statement that this or that is or is not true, 
but rather of authority more as an influence 
working for the production of living certainty. 
We therefore drop for the present the expres- 
sion, "the authority of Christ," and speak of 
Christ as a force creating religious certainty. 
We thus come nearer to the indisputable realm 
of fact. For it would have to be rather hardy 
criticism that could maintain that Christ was 
not a force working for the production of reli- 
gious certainty in his time, and that the 
thought and worship centering around the 
name of Christ are not a force working for 
the production of religious certainty to-day. 
This attempt of ours, moreover, has the further 
advantage that it does not depend upon minute 
knowledge of the results of criticism. We do 
not have to discuss the authenticity of this 
or that passage in the Scriptures. A recogni- 
tion of the general impression which the New 
Testament has made upon the life of the world 
is enough for our immediate purpose. 

We raise, then, the thought of Christ as a 
force making for religious certainty. In 
doing this we may as well keep to some of the 

144 



OHKIST AND KEUGIOTTS CEKTAINTY 

accustomed terms used in speaking of the 
authority of Christ, and so we first think of 
Christ as prophet. Our method delivers us 
from the necessity of trying to find the ipsis- 
sima verba of Christ. We do not care how 
much difference there may be between the 
method of Christ's speech as reported in the 
synoptics and as reported in the fourth gospel. 
We are not concerned especially as to whether 
Mark's version of the words of Christ stands 
nearest to the actual utterances or not. None 
of these things move us. But we are moved 
mightily by the reflection that the essential 
question is not merely what Christ said him- 
self, but what he caused his disciples to say. 
If we are thinking of a teacher as a formal 
authority in the realms where formal authority 
is the final court of appeal the question as to 
just what the teacher says is all-important. 
If, on the other hand, we are thinking of a 
teacher as a vital force in the world of living 
men and living issues the question is not only 
what the teacher himself says but what he 
by the subtle inspiration of his life causes 
his disciples to say. So that when the critic 

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EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

comes to us and claims that he has cut down 
the number of the words of Christ and goes 
on to talk as if he had thereby reduced the 
authority of Christ we are not greatly excited. 
We point out the fact that the gospels and the 
New Testament are here, that only a man 
devoid of historical sense would deny that they 
were produced by contact with Christ, that a 
prophet who can set men to talking as the 
writers of gospels and epistles talked is an 
influence for the production of religious cer- 
tainty to whom we gladly expose our minds. 
When a foremost German scholar declares to 
us that the speeches of the fourth gospel are 
not actual utterances of Christ but rather 
thoughts "disengaged" by the influence of 
Christ, and declares that therefore the formal 
authority of the fourth gospel is diminished, 
we declare that the critic can take away the 
formal authority, if he wishes, so long as we 
have the influence, "God so loved the world, 
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoso- 
ever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life." According to the critic 
this is not the actual literal utterance of Christ 

146 



CHKIST AND KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

but an idea disengaged by Christ. The Christ 
who can disengage such ideas is enough of a 
factor in producing religious certainty to 
warrant our giving ourselves to him as his 
disciples. 

As we read through the gospels we cannot 
get the impression that Christ was trying to 
give formal instruction. The portrait is not 
of a man lecturing to students. There is a 
suggestion of levity in the thought of Peter 
with a notebook. The picture is rather of 
Christ trying by every means in his power to 
rouse his disciples to a grasp on certain great 
general conceptions in a vital way. The gist 
of the gospel has no great bulk. A prophet in 
any age takes a few vast ideas and says them 
over and over again, now in one form and now 
in another, always in such a way as to make 
men feel that the outward, mechanical form is 
not the essential. Christ seems to be striving 
to make men think his truth in their own 
minds by an inward and vital process. 
Whether his words are correctly reported or 
not, they undoubtedly come out of his inspira- 
tion, and they are valuable not only for what 

147 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

they directly say but also for what they sug- 
gest. The revelation in the gospel sets men to 
talking. No other revelation could produce 
such masses of utterance without being 
smothered by its own product. The life 
which was in the mind of Christ in no way 
shows itself more wonderfully than in its 
power to prompt men to speak, and in its 
ability to energize the resulting mass of utter- 
ance with a vitality which makes it life-giving. 
It would be a mark of the vigor of the 
gospel simply to see it surviving so much 
speech, but when we see it reproducing its 
energy through the utterances we behold the 
power of the Christ as a dynamic force which 
claims our minds as its legitimate field. 

The parables are generally conceded to 
represent faithfully the method of Christ in 
his communication of truth. Anything farther 
removed from the method of dogmatic instruc- 
tion than the parables it would be hard to find. 
The parables appeal to living insight. What 
the parable says is of slight significance 
compared with what it suggests; and the sug- 
gestion is not for the mind merely but for the 

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CHEIST AND EEUGIOUS CEETAINTT 

moral understanding. The teaching comes out 
of life and deals with life. The morally alive 
can see the meaning, but the morally dead can- 
not see, even with a commentary. 

If we wish a vivid and picturesque illustra- 
tion of the Master's emphasis on the vital ele- 
ment in teaching we have only to think of that 
parable of the sower, which we are sure repre- 
sents the Master's thought of his work as 
prophet. The truth is seed — not legal or scien- 
tific formula. The way to take care of the 
truth is not to store it away in the memory 
merely, but to scatter it out on the fields of 
human life. No doubt this is a dangerous proc- 
ess, for, to say nothing of the hard-trodden and 
the shallow and the weedy minds, the progress 
from seedtime to harvest is beset with romantic 
perils. Nevertheless, this is the way to de- 
fend the truth and to preserve it — cast it into 
the minds of men and then trust the entire 
system of things for the result! The main 
point, however, for us in this connection is 
that the Lord of the seedtime is also the Lord 
of the harvest and claims the harvest as his 
own. That which was sown was wheat. That 

149 



RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

which comes at the harvest time is wheat. Of 
course, we have to compare harvest grain with 
seed grain to guard against the accidental tare, 
but the truth which comes as a result of the 
sowing of the Christ seed is just as truly 
authoritative as is the seed. The seed is the 
agent which has worked with the great natural 
forces toward the harvest time. The test of 
seed grain and harvest grain is one and the 
same — can they be eaten for the nourishment 
of life? All of which means just this, that the 
thought which comes to men as a result of the 
teaching of Jesus shares the life-giving prop- 
erty of the Master's teaching, that the thought 
of the saints is a product of the thought of 
Christ ; and so long as the thought of the saint 
helps him to be saintly we shall not disturb 
ourselves overmuch with debate as to the 
abstract and formal authority of Christ. 

For some the idea of the authority of Christ 
bases itself on the conception of Christ as 
priest. Christ has redeemed us with his own 
blood, and therefore has a claim upon that 
obedience which leads to increasing knowledge. 
He is our Saviour, and having given himself 

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CHKIST AND EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

for our deliverance from sin he may well expect 
us to rely upon him for deliverance from error. 
He is the spotless Lamb of God. In him dwelt 
all purity, and his moral purity makes him the 
final authority in religious truth. In these and 
many other forms the claim for authority based 
on Christ's priestliness is put. 

We do not criticise this view, but we again 
suggest another line of approach in view of 
the criticisms which this claim so often meets. 
We lay stress upon the indubitable fact that 
the contemplation of the Christ makes for 
moral purity in the world. The question is 
not merely as to the doctrinal terms in which 
the setting on high of righteousness in the 
Cross of Christ is to be framed. We may dis- 
agree in theoretical statements of the work of 
redemption, we may debate over methods of 
conceiving the moral perfection of Christ, but 
there is one point at which we cannot well hesi- 
tate — namely, that the contemplation of Christ 
and his Cross has made for moral enlighten- 
ment. The vital question is not altogether 
as to how we are to construe the moral fullness 
of Christ's self-sacrifice, or how we are to 

151 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

account for that fullness. We must also con- 
sider the moral cleanness which the contact 
with the Christ and his Cross somehow sends 
into the world's life. Instead of arguing 
merely that we ought to believe Christ because 
of his moral fullness, we ought at least at times 
to change the angle and look upon Christ as a 
great factor making for religious certainty 
through the moral insight which has been be- 
gotten by the preaching in his name. We 
rightly take the revelation of Christ on trust 
because of the moral purity which we see in 
him, but we also do well to think of the cer- 
tainty which he has begotten in the minds of 
men through the purification of their lives. 

In discussing the power of Christ on the 
intellectual life of the world we are too apt to 
proceed as if the problem were entirely intel- 
lectual, and so we trace the influence of this or 
that conception. The problem, however, is not 
merely intellectual. There is a moral element 
in the pursuit of truth, and in estimating the 
influence of Christ on the world's thought we 
must take account of this moral element. The 
willingness to follow the truth at any cost, the 

152 



CHRIST AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

willingness to abide by the truth and if neces- 
sary to die for it — all this is moral. The 
unselfishness which is necessary to arrive at 
certain results in thought is moral, Now, in 
this moral realm the coming of Christ into 
the world has played a transcendent part. 
The cleansing and purifying influences which 
we cannot help associating with his name have 
begotten a spirit which has borne abundant 
fruit in philosophic and political and social 
and even scientific thinking. 

If we wished to find a figurative illustration 
to suggest Christ's influence upon the thought 
world through the moral forces which we can- 
not help connecting with his name, w T e might 
be pardoned if we said that Christ was the 
sterilizer of the intellectual instruments 
against evils which would vitiate their work. 
We know that it is not necessarily the surgeon 
with the finest instrument to whom we would 
most willingly intrust the life which can only 
be preserved by a critical operation. Nor is 
the surgeon who is famed as the most skillful 
necessarily the one to whom we would turn. 
In these days, when the secrets of aseptic pro- 

153 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

cedure are a part of popular knowledge, we 
would say that the first requisite is that the 
instrument be absolutely clean. The mind 
that discovered the secret of making the instru- 
ment surgically clean was as truly a benefactor 
as the mind that found a way to put on a keen 
edge. Surgery strode far forward on the day 
when scientific cleanliness became a part of 
the world's knowledge. Operations which 
could have formerly meant only death mean 
life now. If this illustration does not jar too 
much upon our feeling of reverence we may 
say that the forces which we inevitably connect 
with the name of Christ have made for a new 
cleanliness in the world's thinking. It is 
increasingly possible to sterilize the intellec- 
tual instruments, and thus to cut away errors 
without danger of throwing the whole mind 
into fever. An unclean instrument carries 
poison. The deeper it can cut the more harm 
it will do. An unclean mind is more danger- 
ous the sharper it is, and an ordinary mind, 
working with clean edge, is a safer instrument 
for getting at the truth than is any unregener- 
ate genius however brilliant, but the regen- 

154 



CHKIST AND EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

erate genius is indeed a gift from the God of 
truth. 

All this, however, seems rather negative. 
There is a more positive aspect. Any figure 
which speaks of moral cleansing in terms of 
physical cleansing is inadequate. Moral 
insight means power, the power which comes 
out of high vitality. It means the ability to 
respond to an intense quickening. Purity is 
not merely like the condition which results 
when an instrument is wiped clean. It is the 
moral life lifted up to the greater intensities. 

The Master has made us believe that the 
pure in heart shall see God. Suppose we think 
for the moment of the power of seeing. Even 
physical sight means power. The conception 
of the seeing power as a mirror upon which 
objects are passively reflected is outdated. 
Seeing means a high power to build and 
rebuild and build again on the part of the 
mind which sees. The images which float so 
easily before our vision are not passive reflec- 
tions. They are creations fashioned to the 
minutest lines by an agent of unimaginable 
industry. To be sure, the mind is conditioned 

155 



KELIGIOTJS CEETAINTY 

by the physical instrument^ but the funda- 
mental fact is the activity which is back of the 
sight. The development of the power to see 
is not merely the development of an eye. It is 
rather and much more the training of the mind 
in attention and concentration and discrimi- 
nation. Trained observation is an intellectual 
power, not an eye-power, and an intellectual 
power of high grade. A teacher has wrought a 
great service for his pupil when he has taught 
him to see. 

Now, suppose we take a step further and 
look at that purely intellectual seeing which 
has no reference to material objects. Take the 
mind's seizure of the idea of God, for example. 
From the strictly intellectual standpoint the 
idea of God has simply to be thought. There 
is no picture upon which the imagination can 
rest. When we speak of God as a Spirit, and 
go on to talk of nonspatiality and timelessness, 
we are dealing with terms which call for pure 
thinking. A student in this realm of phi- 
losophy once complained that when he began to 
think of spiritual substance which could not 
be pictured he experienced a sort of "falling 

156 



CHEIST AND KELIGIOTTS CERTAINTY 

sensation." It takes a strong head to move in 
the sphere of theistic metaphysics without diz- 
ziness. And this is the justification for the 
feeling that atheism, which cannot get above 
material and physical terms, lacks strength. 
Really to take hold of the idea of God from the 
metaphysical standpoint and think of Spirit 
in spiritual terms requires no little intellectual 
vigor. The idea of God is the product of a 
high degree of intellectual energy. We cannot 
contemplate the idea of God — from the purely 
intellectual standpoint, we mean — without 
marveling at the mental power which has put 
it forth. 

To bring this line to its point and applica- 
tion, we wish to say that the moral apprehen- 
sion of God in that deep conviction which be- 
lieves that he is and that he is the rewarder of 
those who seek for him through doing his will 
requires the highest strength of all. Mightier 
than the power of the eye to see, mightier than 
the mind to think God, is the power of the 
moral nature to see God through purity of 
heart. The soul is not a passive mirror. It is 
an active agent, and the force which can see 

157 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

God comes out of the moral power which is 
uplifted and enlightened by the forces set at 
work through Christian influences. When we 
rightly look the problem squarely in the face 
we find no mightier instance of the force which 
we link with the name of Christ than this 
power to beget, through teaching and through 
life and through the holy love set on high by 
the Cross, the purity of heart which can see 
God. The intellectual daring of the pure heart 
in its attitude toward God is a wonder of won- 
ders. The pure heart no sooner attains a new 
moral insight than it dares demand of God 
subordination to the same law which it puts 
upon itself. The pure in heart no sooner dis- 
cover new obligations for themselves than they 
dare to bind the Almighty with these same 
bonds. The progressive moral improvement 
of the idea of God is a vital process ever going 
on, and we need only the slightest familiarity 
with Church history and the most meager ac- 
quaintance with the lives of the saints to see 
that the dynamic which brings this improve- 
ment about is contact with the teaching of 
Jesus and attempt to catch the spirit of his 

158 



CHKIST AND KELIGIOTJS CERTAINTY 

thought and life and sacrifice. Great as is the 
metaphysical idea of God as an intellectual 
feat, the moral conviction which sees God in 
an unshakable belief that he is Holy Love is 
greater still. The moral force which holds this 
view in the mind of the world in the face of all 
the hard facts which make against it is an evi- 
dence of that steady vitality which streams 
forth from the life which we connect with 
Christ. So long as we are within the stream 
of that vitality we may well leave debates as 
to the theory of the atonement to those who are 
better trained for them. 

There are others to whom the authority of 
Christ always suggests his kingship. They 
recognize that knowledge comes out of action. 
Instead of speculating overmuch about mat- 
ters too high for us, they say that we should 
take the commands of Christ as authoritative 
and go forth to do his will. As we do his will 
we shall learn all that it is necessary for us to 
know of the doctrine. The commands of Christ 
are very simple. Follow them out, and follow 
them out to the letter, and we shall learn 
enough. 

159 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTY 

There is no need to try to withstand the 
force of this claim, but it can be much better 
stated. As ordinarily put the impression made 
is of the commands of Christ as a sort of set of 
military orders whose meaning is very specific 
and clear. We have all sorts of simplifications 
of the commands of Christ, but the most care- 
ful perusal of any and all such simplifications 
would convince us that in reducing the will of 
the King to orders they have emptied Christ's 
words of much of their meaning and power. 
The commandments of Jesus, taken as if thev 
were positive military or legal injunctions to 
do this or to do that, are not in any large sense 
a solution of the problem before us. The words 
of Christ are too much in the language of life 
to allow of their being often used as hard-and- 
fast commands. The question is a life-ques- 
tion. The vital point is this: What did con- 
tact with the Christ make men think they must 
do? What did familiarity with him give them 
an impulse toward doing? It may be that this 
impulse could never be stated in hard-and-fast 
terms. It may be that the disciples worked 
not from any minutely conceived plan but 

160 



CHEIST AND EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

from obedience to impulses begotten in their 
souls as they went about doing the work of 
their Master. Men of action do not always 
work with the end clearly in sight, but as 
we study a consistent statesman's life, for 
example, we feel that in given situations his 
impulse will always move in a given gen- 
eral direction. Now, life is too vast and 
complex to get any one set of rules which will 
serve in all circumstances. The wise general 
does not always tell his lieutenants just what 
they shall do. He acquaints them with the plan 
of his campaign and by his own energy or mag- 
netism fires their souls. They have an impulse 
to do the very best they can under any and all 
circumstances, but what they will do depends 
upon the circumstances. And so the King of 
kings commands men in this living way. The 
study of his life and the attempt to live in his 
spirit and to pray in his name do as a matter 
of fact beget an impulse toward a certain type 
of activity, and out of the activity comes in- 
creasing knowledge. But the relation of the 
King to the activity must be conceived in 
terms of life. A great personal impetus comes 

161 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

out of contact with the King. And real kings 
in all ages have succeeded in just this way. 
The king — the real king, that is, and not some 
puppet or hereditary accident — keeps his 
kingdom moving not so much by dictating 
orders as by generating enthusiasm. The lead- 
ers of history are never understood from their 
words alone, or even from their words and 
deeds. The power to make men feel that they 
can do it — this is the mark of the king. And 
the power to make men really believe that they 
can live pure lives and win others to such life 
is the mark of the kingliness of Christ. At 
first glance the Christ character seems impos- 
sible of reproduction, but the impulse to strive 
after that character comes out of contact with 
the King himself. The impulse sets toward a 
communion with God which seems impossible, 
but with the approach toward the apparently 
impossible life goes approach toward the 
apparently impossible knowledge. 

The Christian conception of the kingliness 
of God seems at first simply a dream too good 
to be true. The idea that the great God over 
all, the Power by which the worlds are, the 

162 



CHEIST AND RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

Force in all things, the unescapable Energy in 
whom we live and move and have our being — 
the idea that this great Being is, after all, the 
great Moral Hero of the universe, that he is the 
bearer of the heaviest weight of every burden, 
that he has willingly assumed the terrible re- 
sponsibilities of Creatorship, putting himself 
under bonds to make peace in anarchic and dis- 
ordered human lives, that he loves even the 
least of men with an everlasting love, that he 
has poured forth his life in real suffering that 
we may enter into his life, that his chief glory 
is a Cross that he would not escape if he could 
and could not if he would — whence did this 
idea get into the consciousness of the race? 
Not from the philosophers, for to many of them 
it is a stumbling-block and to others foolish- 
ness. Not from dreamy and impractical doc- 
trinaires. Eather from those who have will- 
ingly gone into the sorrows of real sacrifice 
and, in the name of a King whose magnetism 
centers about his Cross, have felt the knowl- 
edge welling up within them as they have 
looked toward God. The idea comes out of 
Gethsemane and Calvary and is renewed there 

163 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

day by day in the hearts that dare to die to 
self that they may find life for men. 

But by this time, it may be, some one is im- 
patiently declaring that, after all, we believe in 
Christ because he is the Son of God, that he 
wrought miracles, that he rose from the dead, 
that he sitteth at the right hand of the Father, 
and is himself God of very God. It is what he 
is that makes his revelation true. 

We, who think of ourselves as among the 
believers of the Church, find in the great 
creedal statements concerning Christ an ex- 
pression of our own personal conviction. We 
must, of course, allow scope for varying inter- 
pretations and permit reverent scholarship to 
search the records and to study psychology 
and history for all the light possible upon the 
problems raised by the Christ-life, but we find 
nothing in the results thus far to compel the 
Church to cut out of her statements the real 
heart of their meaning. Holding, then, as we 
do to the great essentials concerning Christ, it 
may be permissible to look from a slightly dif- 
ferent angle at some things which have always 
been believed about him. Suppose we consider 

164 



CHEIST AND KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

creedal statements as effects produced in the 
human mind and try thus to find some fresh 
measure of the power of Christ on the thinking 
of his followers. Take the thought of Christ 
as a worker of miracles. The wonder is not 
merely that Christ could work miracles, even 
if we make them as little departures from the 
ordinary as possible, but also that people ever 
thought he worked miracles. No amount of 
evidence could make us believe that just any 
ordinary man could work any sort of miracle. 
There is something of the miraculous in the 
very credibility of the miracles of grace and 
goodness attributed to Christ. The critic may 
tell us that the miracles are simply attempts 
on the part of the followers of Christ to state 
in their largest terms the effect which the sur- 
passing personality of Christ had made upon 
their minds. To which we may be permitted 
to reply that the impression must then have 
been very tremendous indeed. The life of holy 
love in him must have been indeed irresistible 
if the disciples thought that nothing even in 
the system of things could stand in its way. 
The life must have been mighty too if all 

165 



KELIGIOUS OEETAINTY 

through the ages Christian thought has some- 
how felt that extraordinary power over the 
material is a natural accompaniment of the 
spiritual power in Christ. Or take the thought 
of the Eesurrection. No matter what the terms 
in which we put our belief in the risen Lord, so 
long as we leave a heart of reality in it. The 
miracle is not only that Christ appeared to his 
disciples, but the fact that all through the ages 
men have thought that he appeared. The 
critics may tell us that the belief in a risen 
Lord came about because the power clinging 
to his name led to the assumption that Christ 
was still alive. The belief in a resurrection 
was an effect of the power of Christ, in other 
words. A good deal of an effect, one would 
think. We do not often have to resort to such 
explanations of personal power. The explana- 
tion is of value as suggesting that these ex- 
traordinary beliefs would not be credible con- 
cerning an ordinary man. If Christ so struck 
the minds of his followers that the after effects 
were a series of visions that showed him as 
still alive, he must have struck hard; and if 
the impression of his life on the consciousness 

166 



CHKIST AND KELIGIOITS CEKTAINTY 

of the world to-day is such that it seems 
natural to believe that he appeared to his dis- 
ciples after death the impression must be very 
deep indeed. The belief in the Besurrection, 
even the fiercest critic of the supernatural 
would admit, is an effect of the impact of the 
life of Christ on the mind of the world. No 
matter how much the evidence, it would be 
almost hopeless to try to convince the world 
that any ordinary man had risen from the 
dead. Such reappearance would seem out of 
harmony with the system of things. The fact 
that we can believe in the resurrection ap- 
pearances, on any explanation of them, is a 
tribute to the dynamic force which was in 
Christ. And take still further the belief in 
the essentially unique divinity of Christ. The 
philosopher and the scientist have demolished 
this belief so often that the repetition of the 
demolition itself becomes an argument. A 
belief that has been killed so often and must be 
attacked anew in every generation is a good 
deal of a belief. The belief in the Incarnation 
in Christ has survived so often unsatisfactory 
explanation by its friends and cogent refuta- 

167 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

tion by its enemies that we overlook the simple 
significance of the fact that the belief is still 
here, living on in the face of the logical and 
philosophical and critical objections so skill- 
fully urged against it. There must be vigor 
somewhere to account for this persistence. If 
men had begun to talk about any other person 
in the field of human history as much as they 
began from the first to talk about Christ such 
person would have been long ago talked into 
oblivion. Even if every word uttered about 
such a character had been friendly the interest 
in him would not have survived the discussion. 
Men would have become tired long ago. But 
Christ survives both favorable and unfavorable 
discussion. He thrusts himself into the fore- 
front of every era's thinking and must be re- 
peatedly explained. Some critics explain him 
away in every generation, but he comes back, 
and it is necessary for the explanation to begin 
anew. Such necessity of repeated explanation 
is a hint of the life which is somehow in the 
thought of Christ. 

The point to which we have been coming, 
however, is this, that the vital fact to keep 

168 



CHKIST AND KEUGIOUS CEETAINTY 

before us in discussing the divinity of Christ is 
just the pressure on the minds of the followers 
through the centuries for larger and larger 
explanation of Christ. The same term is used 
but with an ever larger meaning. The earliest 
gospel writer began the account of the Christ 
life with an abrupt opening of the public min- 
istry. One later writer felt that he must start 
from David and another from Adam. The 
fourth gospel finds it necessary to get back to 
the beginning of all things. As Christianity 
took the mighty leaps forward the writers 
seemed to feel that they must start farther and 
farther back to get a momentum which could 
project the explanation as far forward as the 
conquests. The real heresy was and is not so 
much hesitation to use the age-old terms as an 
unwillingness to put into those terms the 
largest meaning which the thought of every 
advancing day can supply. The heretic is not 
so much the man who will not say "God" as the 
man who will not put into the word the largest 
idea which the time can find. The heretic is 
not so much the man who is slow to speak of 
the divinity of Christ in the accustomed terms 

169 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

as the man who will not load those terms with 
the weightiest meanings that he can lift. Eeal 
loyalty to the Incarnation of God in Christ is 
to make the truth mean the most possible to 
man and to God. And this is to be obedient 
to that onrushing vitality in the belief in the 
Christ as that vitality touches the tingling 
lives of the saints. If we could in this life find 
a final meaning for the divinity of Christ we 
would have in our finding disproved the 
divinity, for the supreme characteristic of the 
divinity is this enormous pressure of life 
toward larger meanings. The real authorita- 
tive power is this compelling spiritual force. 

Where, then, shall we find the word which 
gives us the true start as we think of the au- 
thenticity of Christ? Where but in the word 
of which the fourth gospel makes so much — the 
Life? This does not mean merely the historical 
career of Jesus. It does not mean merely what 
he said or what he did. It means all this and 
more. It means the Cross, for we think of the 
Cross as the exposure of the most sensitive 
life-center in the universe — even the heart and 
conscience of God. It means the lives of fol- 

170 



CHKIST AND EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

lowers, the invisible body of Christ which is 
his Church. It means all those influences 
everywhere which are loosened and put to 
work by prayer in the name of Christ, and all 
the powers which are permeated by the spirit 
of Christ — in a word, the vital resultant of all 
the forces which can be in any real sense called 
Christian. 

What Christian life calls for it is entitled to 
take. It must not take error, of course, but 
the Christian life does not call for error. The 
life fashions for itself institutions and it 
fashions beliefs. If a belief nourishes the life 
the belief is held fast. If a belief cramps the 
life the belief is cast aside. The doctrines 
which we have incidentally mentioned have 
their real authority not alone in the reasons 
which can be formally advanced for them, but 
much more in the effectiveness with which they 
have ministered to life. The life itself is the 
final aim. Out of this the beliefs come and to 
this they must return. The life which is be- 
gotten by the influences which we think of as 
really Christian stands in its own right. It is 
the final authority. It has the right of way. 

171 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTT 

The living Christian experience, with its needs 
and cravings and aspirations and insights, is 
the ideal and standard. Evidences and rea- 
sons and systems have their place, and their 
place is to minister to the life. In so far as 
they do this they are produced by the Christ 
power and take their authority from him, not 
merely because of what they say, but because 
of what they in turn produce. Beliefs are not 
to be judged altogether by their logical conse- 
quences, but are to be tested also by their life 
consequences. 

The argument for the divineness of Christ 
once turned largely around the power of Christ 
to satisfy the needs of men. Men were thought 
of as having certain inevitable yearnings and 
aspirations. The divineness of Christ was 
shown in his power to satisfy those needs. 
There is not a lack which he cannot fill. This 
argument has not lost its force, but another 
argument is coming forward — the power of 
the preaching of Christ to create the needs of 
the heart, to stir men with unspeakable discon- 
tent and with insatiable hunger for the best. 
Christian life is the great creator of demands 

172 



CHEIST AND KEUGIOUS CEETAINTY 

in the human soul. Christ is life. Demands 
grow out of life. The demand for a newer and 
deeper knowledge of the Scriptures to-day is 
created by the life which is Christ. The in- 
sistence upon better applications of the gospel 
to social needs, the passion for larger life for 
world-wide humanity — these are not merely 
cravings of the human heart which the life in 
Christ can satisfy; they are tumultuous de- 
mands which the presence of Christ in the 
lives of disciples has begotten. The man who 
turns against these demands and reproaches 
them or ignores them knows not what spirit 
he is of. 

The apostle thanked God that neither death 
nor life can separate us from the love of God 
in Christ Jesus our Lord. Men sometimes 
draw back from increasing intellectual and 
moral life as if it could separate from the love 
of God. They are afraid of theological dis- 
cussion, and of larger individual and social 
applications of the gospel, and of the general 
progress of thought and life in the great throb- 
bing world. If these stirrings really come of 
life and make for life they cannot separate 

173 



EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

from Christ, but must rather bring to a better 
and better understanding of him, for all 
spiritual life currents spring from him and 
to him they must return. He comes that men 
may have life and that they may have it 
more abundantly. The living Christ is the 
one unescapable spiritual force which we 
must take as authoritative in the deepest and 
fullest sense. We believe in him as alive 
because of what such belief brings to pass in 
our own lives. Yesterday, to-day, and forever 
the life is the light of men. 



174 



XI 

UNUSUAL INNER EXPERIENCES AND 
RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

We have discussed with some fullness the 
various factors which play upon the soul to 
make it certain of religious truth. There are 
some special types of inner experience which 
have always seemed to religious thought to 
carry with themselves the mark of certainty, 
and these do not always seem the direct re- 
sultant of the various forces which we have 
considered. Some believers speak of the "inner 
light" as the self-evidencing witness to the 
truth. Others speak in more general but just 
as positive terms of "assurance/ ' and others 
still of the "witness of the Spirit." While 
there is more and more agreement that no 
truth, even if it be the direct teaching of 
Church or Scripture, can be of avail for the in- 
dividual except as the individual works the 
truth into his life, there is also a widespread 
feeling that some inner experiences of the in- 

175 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

dividual have of themselves especial power to 
beget certainty. These are often so independ- 
ent of external authority and suggestion that 
they seem to be preeminently direct witnesses 
to the presence and power of the divine. 

We look first at those remarkable experi- 
ences which have been at the heart of mysti- 
cism throughout all the ages. There is no 
room for doubt that souls here and there 
throughout all time have entered into states of 
consciousness in religious meditation and de- 
votion which have been far above the normal. 
There can be no doubt that these experiences 
carry with them an unusual force as witnesses 
to realities beyond themselves. 

In estimating the real value of these experi- 
ences as witnesses to religious truth we apply 
our usual test. Do they mean life? Do they 
come out of life and make for life? Do they 
make for fullness of soul-power? Is the soul 
more of a force after than before? Do they 
carry with them an impulse out toward the 
largest and highest spiritual reaches? 

Judged by this test some spiritual experi- 
ences fall at the outset into the category of the 

176 



UNUSUAL INNEE EXPEEIENCES 

insignificant or worse, while others rise into 
vast importance. We see at once that any re- 
ligious force which is likely to spend itself in 
mere enthusiasm is not of considerable impor- 
tance. The activity set at work is not of a high 
kind. The howling of the dervish, for example, 
does not represent any activity except that of 
the body excited to such a degree that the soul 
sinks into insignificance. The remark of a 
worshiper at an extravagantly emotional re- 
ligious meeting has almost pathetic signifi- 
cance in this connection. This man had found 
vent for ecstatic excitement in prodigious 
shouting. After he had sunk back exhausted 
he felt a horrible fear creeping over him that 
he had "shouted all his religion away." Ee- 
ligious experience which spends itself in great 
bursts of emotionalism is apt to be shouted 
away. 

In another class of experiences, however, the 
outcome is different, and it is by their out- 
comes that such crises must be judged. The 
experiences of prophets and saints and mys- 
tics which have left an abiding effect on Chris- 
tianity were an exaltation of the faculties to a 

177 



EELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

lofty degree. The visions were not mere ex- 
travagances of deranged nerves, but were 
visions really worth seeing. In many instances 
the result of the dream was a transformed 
nation. When the prophets dreamed they 
dreamed with their eyes open and with all 
their sensibilities alert. Moreover, they mani- 
fested that high form of spiritual power which 
we sometimes think of as static rather than as 
dynamic, but which is nevertheless a resultant 
of enormous soul activities, namely, spiritual 
balance. Balance does not mean passivity, 
but rather activity. 

This, then, is the test of spiritual experiences 
claiming the highest certainty because of an 
immediacy which they profess to bear: from 
what range and quality of life do they come 
and what activities do they loosen? Are they 
followed by an advance of the kingdom of 
God or by a shrinkage of that kingdom? Do 
they give the impulse to any kind of expan- 
sion? We must remember constantly some 
implications wrapped up in the truth that the 
mind has its being in its activities. The mind 
is not a passive receptacle, but a working 

178 



UNUSUAL INNEE EXPEEIENCES 

agent. How much of truth it will receive will 
depend upon how much truth it can think for 
itself by an active process. The quality of the 
truth too will depend upon the quality of the 
mind. The truth will be shaped to the grasp- 
ing intelligence. The degree of certainty will 
ultimately depend upon whether the whole life 
can use the truth. The test is whether 
extraordinary life follows the extraordinary 
experience. One mark of full life is that pro- 
pensity to spiritual seizure which we call 
faith. 

It is very significant that the great spiritual 
uplifts of the Christian saints have been will- 
crises. The crisis has come at the climax of 
heroic or persistent doing of good or has at- 
tended some sublime self-surrender in the face 
of a mighty task. Quite often those who dedi- 
cate themselves to lives of service, such as work 
in foreign missions or in other spheres beyond 
the ordinary in demands upon the spirit of 
self-sacrifice, find at the moment of consecra- 
tion some unusual illumination. This is more 
than the mere nervous relief which comes with 
the settling of the will into place for the task. 

179 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTT 

Too much of spiritual significance is involved 
for that. So it has often happened that those 
who have given themselves to difficult tasks 
and then have afterward wondered in the 
midst of their duties if they have not been 
mistaken about the "call" have often taken a 
new grip on themselves and on their problem 
by remembering the illumination which at- 
tended the moment of consecration. We can- 
not rule out such experiences as not having a 
peculiar self-evidencing value. They mean too 
much for the life of the worker, and this out- 
come in the life of the worker counts. We can 
see how a man might be grievously mistaken 
in applying such a course of reasoning as this 
to his particular situation, but we are speaking 
of the general question. 

Another believer bases his religious cer- 
tainty on the answer to prayer. If the prayer 
life is conceived of as a magical incantation 
which brings material blessings to the prayer- 
maker without involving the entire life of the 
prayer-maker we rule out answer to prayer as 
a factor in religious certainty at once. We 
think of prayer, however, as a very intense 

180 



UNUSUAL INNER EXPEEIENCES 

form of activity involving necessarily the en- 
tire life, if the prayer is at all sincere. Take 
even the thought of prayer as petition for 
material things, or for the welfare of a friend. 
The prayer can hardly be sincere until it in- 
volves the entire life of the petitioner. If it is 
a sincere prayer the petitioner will use his 
mind, asking himself repeatedly if the object 
for which he prays is the best. The heart of 
the petitioner is sincere, asking itself if the 
petition in any sense comes out of selfishness 
and if it is able to say, "Thy will be done." The 
will is the will of sincerity, anxious to go to 
any length to bring about the results prayed 
for. In most cases we can see that the prayer 
would be answered by a reinforcement of the 
will of the petitioner and by an enriching of 
his life out toward the object sought for. The 
prayer might be answered by putting the ob- 
ject prayed for within reach. If putting the 
object within reach means simply giving the 
petitioner a longer reach is not the prayer an- 
swered as truly as if the effect were directly 
upon the object? And does not thinking of 
prayer in these terms make for larger life than 

181 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

any other conception? We live only as we act, 
and the answer to prayer which involves the 
most of activity on the part of the petitioner is 
the truest answer. 

Here some one may protest that all this is 
merely reflex, and that by speaking as if the 
results were altogether reflex we have robbed 
prayer of its power to produce certainty as to 
the existence of a hearer of prayer. One ob- 
jector when told that the main effect of prayer 
for bad men was to arouse the good men to a 
sense of their responsibility toward the bad 
men replied that if the reflex influence were all 
he would just as soon pray to a blank wall. 
He failed to see that even in reflex influences, 
so called, there must be something strong 
enough to bend the force back upon the peti- 
tioner. A prayer flowing off into empty space 
would hardly do this. We get light here by 
asking ourselves how much good would be 
likely to come from a prayer deliberately ad- 
dressed to a blank wall. It is in the assump- 
tion that the prayer reaches the life of Another 
that the power of prayer lives, and as long as 
such prayer is followed by beneficent and life- 

182 



UNUSUAL INNER EXPEEIENCES 

giving results the petitioners will continue to 
act upon the assumption that there is One who 
hears and answers. In the life results that 
follow such assumption lie those evidences of 
the reality of the unseen which come out of 
prayer. 

We would not have it thought that by the 
above paragraph we mean that the only answer 
to prayer is "subjective^' as distinguished from 
"objective." We mean first that any answer 
to petition involves a stimulus of the entire 
life of the petitioner, and that this quickening 
is itself an answer. Moreover, even where an 
answer seems to come directly without the ac- 
tivity of the petitioner we must suppose that 
in so far as the prayer counts at all it counts 
because the life of the petitioner, setting in a 
full flood in a particular direction, makes 
a spiritual fact, or creates a situation among 
the spiritual forces which must be taken 
account of. A petition which is merely artic- 
ulated breath may be dismissed for all spir- 
itual purposes, but if we must believe for the 
satisfaction of our scientific demands that 
even the breath waves started by such a peti- 

183 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

tioner have to be taken account of, much more 
may we believe that in sincere prayer the 
spiritual life-throbs beating out toward a 
desired object have to be reckoned with. If 
we believe in physical system we may believe 
also in spiritual system. If we believe that 
the physical system to some extent waits on 
our initiative we may believe also that the 
spiritual system waits on us. If it be said 
that in thus assuming that the Power back 
of all things has to some degree to rely upon 
our help we are gratifying an impulse mar- 
velously akin to egotism, we reply that it may 
be so, but that when we see life following such 
assumptions we believe that life and truth are 
synonymous. Many interlocking assumptions 
are wrapped up in the Christian thought of 
prayer: the idea of the existence of God, and 
the idea of God as the God of Christianity, 
and the idea of ourselves as of value to God, 
and even the idea of God as waiting on the 
will-attitudes of men. But these assumptions 
are in the path of life, and we hold fast to 
them and take increase of certainty from them. 
By their fruits we know them. 

184 



UNUSUAL INNER EXPEEIENCES 

If, however, our conception of prayer is to 
remain on the plane of petition it does not 
involve life deeply enough, for life is more 
than petition. My life with other persons is 
essentially communion, and religious life at 
its best must be communion with God. Prayer 
in the sense of communion must involve the 
whole life, and must especially touch the will. 
The key to all understanding of the divine is 
through the divine will. He that doeth the 
will cometh to the knowledge. Here as every- 
where else vital knowledge grows out of expe- 
rience. The worker in any field comes to a 
peculiar knack as the result of his practice. 
This is true with all forms of activity, from 
day-labor to the flights of artistic genius. An 
engineer once explained his neglect to look 
at a timepiece to tell if his locomotive was on 
time by declaring that he did not need a time- 
piece — he could tell "by the swing of the 
engine." Most vital knowledge comes as we 
learn the swing of the engine. Nothing is 
more disappointing than to read the expla- 
nations bv successful men as to the secret of 
their success. The secret cannot be told, 

185 



KELIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 

though often the biographers seem unaware 
of the impossibility. The secret is in the 
subtle power of the successful life to feel and 
find its way unerringly as a result of long 
experience. Just as the nature-lovers or the 
artists or the skilled artisans come into a fine 
communion with the objects of their lifelong 
endeavors, so, only in an intenser and rarer 
degree, do the doers of the will of God become 
certain of God. Their own explanations and 
descriptions of their experiences are often very 
disappointing. As we come to know their lives 
we feel that there is more in what they say 
than would appear on the surface. They 
attain to an awareness which cannot be 
described, but which is the very heart of the 
certainty. 

We come into most vital communion with 
our friends by comradeship with them, a 
willingness to work with them and for them. 
This comradeship is especially quickening to 
the mind and heart. It brings sentiment out 
of the realm of the dream and romantic fancy 
and keeps its feet on the earth. Walking thus 
on the earth, the sentiment takes on a solid 

186 



UNUSUAL INNER EXPERIENCES 

worthfulness which nothing can shake. Com- 
munion with God means comradeship with 
God, and all the understandings which come 
out of comradeship. The Scriptures seem to 
suggest this when they speak of walking with 
God. The Christian's certainty does not arise, 
as does the Oriental's, out of absorbed and 
trancelike contemplation. It is begotten by 
walking with God. Just as a man reveals 
himself in his inner purpose and nature on a 
long journey, so God reveals himself as we 
walk with him — that is to say, as we leave the 
realm of mere contemplation and move along 
his pathway, keeping step with his will. The 
answer to prayer in this wide sense is not 
some one detailed result to which we can 
point, but rather the general influence which 
streams into life as the result of doing the will 
of God. Often the best part of the response 
of our friends to us is not anything which we 
can repeat in words, or even anything which 
we can describe. Rather is it the spiritual 
impressions which we have experienced as very 
real and yet as altogether elusive when we 
attempt a description. So when the critic asks 

187 



KELIQIOUS CEKTAINTY 

us to point to an instance of answer to prayer 
we reply that answer to prayer is one of those 
pervasive spiritual realities which cannot be 
pointed at. If the critic insists on proof of 
realities back of the experience of the saints 
we can only point to the saints themselves. 
If the critic is still not satisfied we have to 
sav that for us the results of the communion 
with God which the good man professes are 
enough. We cannot believe that true life 
comes from believing that which is at its 
center false. If the critic should insist upon 
arguing with the saints he would probably not 
get response which would satisfy his logic, but 
he could hardly succeed in raising any ques- 
tions which would disturb the saints. For 
them the certainty of the presence of God 
comes out of religious awareness. 

Recurring to the high experiences with the 
discussion of which we started, we remark 
now that we cannot place limits upon these 
experiences, and so long as they come out of 
holy living we feel no need of placing limits 
upon them. So long as they make for life 
they are worth while and carry in themselves 

188 



UNUSUAL INNEE EXPEEIENCES 

the witness to their own truth. For the saints 
this sense of the presence of the Divine is 
enough. For the bystanders who are not so 
saintly the life of the saints is the only argu- 
ment. In dealing with skeptics we can fairly 
challenge skepticism, if it is really consistent 
with itself and finds a consistent expression 
in life, to match the life of the saints. 

Before we pass from the certainty-producing 
power of inner experiences it may be well to 
add a word as to the clearly marked conscious- 
ness of a definite conversion from the life of 
evil to the life of good. We mention this 
because some, in insisting upon the conscious- 
ness of the life of the Divine in human hearts, 
confuse the satisfaction which follows right 
living with a definite break or upheaval in 
feeling which sometimes marks the beginning 
of new spiritual life. We can hardly see how 
a career of outbreaking evil could be suddenly 
abandoned without an accompaniment of the 
unusual or the unaccustomed in thought and 
feeling, especially if the break were brought 
about by some dramatic climax in the life of 
the transformed man. It would, however, be 

189 



RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

difficult to find sufficient reason for making 
an upheaval in consciousness which might 
conceivably thus mark the beginning of new 
life the standard for all life, or for considering 
such upheaval a superior sign of the reality 
and certainty of religious truth. The man 
whose abandonment of wrongdoing has been 
marked by violent penitence and by almost 
ecstatic sense of relief does not, indeed, need 
argument to convince him of the reality of 
spiritual forces; but he must not take his 
experience as the sole or even the chief type 
of religious certainty. 

We are growing to recognize more and 
more clearly that the ideal is the life which 
goes out toward right doing from the begin- 
ning; that the true organ for religious 
certainty is the mind which has never lost its 
innocence; that the more we know about evil 
the less we can know about God; that the 
scars of evil-doing are ineradicable except by 
long processes of healing companionship with 
the Divine. A mind that has shunned evil 
may not be able to testify to startlingly 
definite crises, but the settled conviction of 

190 



UNUSUAL INNEE EXPEEIENCES 

such a life as to the reality and presence of 
God is of superlative evidential value. 

The recognition of this truth will lead us 
to lay more emphasis on fineness of feeling 
and exquisiteness of taste as organs for the 
reception of the divine. The purer, subtler 
shades of divine meanings are not apt to be 
those which can be shouted from the house- 
tops into the ears of all the passers-by. There 
is an aspect of divine revelation as rare as any 
of the revelations which bloom from the artis- 
tic impulse. A divine art characterizes the 
highest messages from God. If we are to lift 
our thought of God up to the highest — and 
we must do this if we are finally to satisfy 
ourselves — we must see in the growing 
reliance upon fineness of feeling and of re- 
ligious taste something of a revelation of God 
himself, and we must think of God as revealing 
himself especially to those keener suscepti- 
bilities. Now, while it is impossible to place 
bounds upon the divine grace as it deals with 
the soul that has passed years in rank trans- 
gression, yet our deepening moral sense de- 
mands that we shall not treat sin so lightly 

191 



EELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

as to teach that sin makes no difference in the 
final consequences. We must see the devas- 
tation wrought by evil especially upon the 
fineness of the life. We must put over against 
the dullness of sight of those who have been 
unclean or selfish the keen discernment of 
those who, in spite of infirmities and momen- 
tary lapses, have never really fallen into in- 
tentional evil. The testimony of one such who 
can see is worth more than the testimony of 
all the others who cannot see. 

The ideal life, we repeat, is the one which 
from the beginning serves God. Such a life 
may not be able to tell the date of any 
spiritual crisis, and yet may feel settling down 
into itself as a deposit from the daily doing 
of the deeds of righteousness a certainty which 
nothing can shake. A pure soul is the true 
instrument of spiritual apprehension. The 
activities are intenser. The demands of the 
life are more insistent. We must not think 
that the seizures of such a soul are inferior 
in tenacity of grasp to those of the more 
clamorous who have departed into sin and then 
have come back to righteousness with loud 

192 



UNUSUAL INNER EXPERIENCES 

emotional upheaval. The development of the 
religious sense is intricate and delicate. The 
presence of evil can set back the development. 
We do not mean that those of this rarer life 
are not conscious of evil. The saints of the 
most blameless life often feel agony over sin 
most poignantly. They see aright the ravages 
of sin. They see aright the distance between 
the piety of any man however good and the 
goodness of God. And such souls, we repeat, 
are the organs of revelation. In their light 
we see light. What their lives call for must 
have the right of way. By the weight of the 
goodness of their lives they attain to an 
authority among their fellows. The beliefs 
which nourish such lives must be on the path 
to reality. The statement may be inadequate, 
but the heart of the belief must be true. By 
their fruits we shall know them. We shall 
recognize the saint by saintliness, and the 
belief which produces the fruit of holiness 
must be close to the centers of reality. 



193 



XII 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

It is now time for us to gather up into more 
connected statement some of the suggestions 
which have appeared along our way. We con- 
clude that Christian belief is both root and 
fruit of Christian life. The belief consists in 
the body of assumptions which the life must 
have for its own self-preservation. The re- 
ligious consciousness makes room for itself. 
The fundamental fact is the life. 

First, we insist upon room for objective 
fact. We must know the facts. We must have 
the most hospitable attitude toward scientists 
and historians and critics. Only, we insist 
that the assumptions at work in the discovery 
and interpretation of fact shall be brought out 
into the light. When we read that the proper 
basis for reconciliation between science and 
religion to-day is to allow science first to find 
the facts and to arrange them in systematic 
ord6r, then to allow religion to estimate the 

194 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

value of the facts, we remember that science 
cannot move at all without demands and as- 
sumptions and atmospheres and expectations. 
These are legitimate themes for discussion by 
the theologian, both in themselves and in their 
bearing upon the results likely to be obtained. 
The real battle between religion and science 
is to be fought out not so much over the 
detailed facts as over the backlying assump- 
tions. So when the biblical student tells us 
that we are to let the scientific critic determine 
the facts for us we reserve the right to suspend 
judgment until we are sure that there is no 
preliminary battle to be fought over the 
assumptions. Since assumptions play so large 
a part in the discovery and interpretation of 
facts, we are within our rights in attempting 
to make the assumptions clear at the start. 
After we have examined the assumptions we 
shall be ready to look at the detailed pro- 
nouncements of the critics. Back in the six- 
ties a school of biblical criticism professing 
to be most scrupulously and scientifically 
objective arose in Germany. This school took 
the Hegelian doctrine of thesis, antithesis, and 

195 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTT 

synthesis as absolute and unquestionable. On 
this basis the New Testament was rearranged, 
gospels and epistles assigned to various 
hitherto unsuspected authorships, the book of 
Acts divided into a Pauline and a Petrine 
section, and the chronology of the books 
adapted to meet the needs of the theory, 
While New Testament scholarship has passed 
beyond the view of this particular school, it 
would be hazardous to affirm that any type of 
New Testament criticism is much freer from 
assumption than was the Hegelian school. 
Subjective demands are very potent in the 
critical handling of all biblical questions. 
Suppose we were to consider that passage in 
John in which Jesus is reported as calling 
upon God to glorify him with the glory which 
he had with the Father before the worlds were. 
We should find the utmost variety of inter- 
pretations. One student would take the words 
as referring to a conscious personal existence 
before the beginning of the Christ-life on 
earth; another would rule this out as self- 
evidently absurd, and speak of ideal pre- 
existence; still another would say that the 

196 



SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 

words were the recollections of a reporter 
writing years after the event ; and still another 
might insist that the words were interpolated 
by a later hand. In each case the inner de- 
mand would play no small part in arriving at 
the conclusion. We are open to the facts — 
only we want the assumptions clear from the 
start. 

We insist also upon the necessity of room 
for the efforts of the logical faculty to render 
systems of theology self-consistent. The func- 
tion of logic is to take the assumptions which 
spring out of the religious demands and to rid 
these of contradiction and to fit them together 
into system, bringing them out definitely into 
the light and arranging them in order. We 
insist that logic moves by its own rules and is 
final arbiter in its own sphere. The limits we 
place upon formal logic are these: it must 
not think of itself as the whole of mind; it 
must not think that it can decide against a 
belief which transcends logic as it can decide 
against a belief which contradicts logic. The 
logical activity is one of the activities of 
human life, and as such must be recognized 

197 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

and utilized. It is not the chief activity, 
however. It can better serve thought by 
recognizing its own limitations than by as- 
suming a right to rule which it cannot make 
good. 

The religious demand is for the satisfaction 
of the highest and fullest life. Our view gives 
us a chance to recognize the great outside 
influences which have played a part in the 
shaping of religious belief. Anything which 
makes for the broadening of human life makes 
for the broadening of religious doctrine. The 
discovery of a new land, the invention of a 
labor-saving machine, the general change in 
an economic situation, the triumph of democ- 
racy in war or at the polls, the painting of a 
great picture, or the rise of a school of artists 
in music, the spread of intelligence — these and 
a thousand other factors like them may over- 
throw an old item of creed and lead to the 
shaping of another. Anything which broadens 
life will enlarge the creed in the sense that it 
will at least put larger meanings into the 
creed. Take the word "God" itself. After the 
announcement of the Copernican system, or 

198 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

the discovery of America, or the invention of 
the printing press, or the political revolutions 
of America and France, or the industrial revo- 
lution in England, or the paintings of artists 
like Raphael, or the rise of the public school 
system, it is necessary to subtract from and 
add to our idea of God. This is not done bv 
formal decrees of councils. It is done half- 
consciously or unconsciously by the religious 
life processes of humanity. We are not con- 
tent to have our thought of God remain 
cramped when our thought of everything else 
is expanding. The process is slow but very 
real because very vital. Consider the single 
idea of the relation of God to nations outside 
the sphere of those that have from time to 
time regarded themselves as his particular 
peoples. Our thought of the love of God for 
the heathen, as we call them, and of his provi- 
dential working for them, is not yet such as to 
do us especial credit, but this idea has met 
vast change for the better throughout the 
centuries. The change has come not through 
formal argument so much as through a long 
line of historic forces of which the publication 

199 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

of the book of Jonah was an early manifesta- 
tion and the Russo-Japanese war a later 
revelation. 

Of more importance still in shaping the 
creed by life process has been the actual expe- 
rience of those who through all the years from 
the beginning have constituted the real 
Church, the invisible body of worshipers. 
Some of the critics of the Church have failed 
to see the essentially organic nature of the 
Church. They could hardly have been ex- 
pected to think of Paul's figure of the Church 
as the Body of Christ, but they have erred 
through not thinking of the Church as an 
organism. They have regarded the creeds as 
artificial productions put together by crafty 
priests. They have failed to note that every 
important statement in the creed had its his- 
torical justification and was in its own time 
good. The crudest theory of atonement which 
ever came to any large measure of acceptance 
by the Church had at its center a moral pur- 
pose which the Church felt she must keep 
alive. 

The catholic beliefs have come out of life. 

200 



SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 

They have in their times met the needs of life. 
They have themselves been alive, and have 
died only as they gave birth to better belief. 
The massive convictions of the Church are the 
outcome of something different from arbitrary 
decrees. We are not pleading now for any 
authority except the authority of spiritual 
influence. We admit that the Church has 
many times exercised her right in altogether 
too material a fashion, but making all allow- 
ances we must conclude that the authoritv of 
the Church is the authority of a vast spiritual 
organism making demands in the name of 
spiritual life. The call of two hundred million 
men for bread is an authoritative revelation 
that bread is a necessity of life, no matter what 
some speculating chemist may conclude to 
the contrary. The appetite of a living or- 
ganism for some truths is an authority as to 
the necessity of those truths for human life. 
This does not mean that the Church has any 
large claim to authority in details of conduct 
outside the moral essentials which all recog- 
nize, or that the technical formulation of a 
belief can be made literally binding forever. 

201 



RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

It does mean, however, that the fact that men 
who come into touch with the Church through 
any vital bond feel that the pressure of moral 
and spiritual needs makes the demand for the 
satisfaction of these needs imperative and 
authoritative. The very demand is an indica- 
tion of a power to satisfy on the part of the 
outside Reality. The faith of the Church is 
the evidence of things not seen. The very fact 
that an immense organism of mankind, living 
throughout the ages, has had faith and been 
able to keep the faith is an authoritative reve- 
lation that the faith has been begotten by a 
Power beyond ourselves — authoritative be- 
cause without such assumption the faith would 
die, and faith stands in its own right as a 
part of human life. Faith will look upon any 
assumptions as essentially true which enable 
it to live. 

Of more importance still are the religious 
insights which have become part of the fur- 
nishing of the human mind through the re- 
ligious genius of gifted individuals. The part 
played by the genius in the realm of religion 
is akin to the part played by the genius in any 

202 



SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION " 

other realm. The genius is dependent upon 
the life around him, and at the same time the 
life around is dependent upon the genius. 
An inventor sometimes contrives a machine 
which is so manifestly a blessing to the men 
of his day that they speak as if the invention 
had come in response to a demand. The time 
might have demanded, however, without re- 
sponse if the inventor had not been at hand. 
So with the religious genius — the man with 
extraordinary insight. He seems at times to 
have seized truth for which the age has been 
long calling in half-articulate syllables, but 
the age could have called in vain if the genius 
had not been near to hear. 

The genius absorbs ideas mistily floating 
in the air of his time and bodies these forth 
into definite expression. The final result may 
be a hymn or a new turn in ecclesiastical or- 
ganization or a fresh phrasing of a truth, like 
some of those profound insights the early 
fathers uttered to the everlasting benefit of 
the Church. The test, however, is as to 
whether these utterances have come out of 
life and whether they bear upon life. If the 

203 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

assumptions of the religious genius seem to 
be necessary for his own highest life the 
Church has always been willing to look upon 
these assumptions as authoritative, though the 
ordinary mind may never awake to the aware- 
ness of the divine which makes the assump- 
tions necessary. The ideas which can produce 
a seer or prophet, which when dropped into 
life make for the rich saintliness possible in 
the Church's spiritual leaders, are justified by 
their results, as wisdom is ever justified in her 
children. If the beliefs produce giants the 
beliefs must lie close to the springs of reality. 
If the crown of all realities is a kingly human 
life, if the realest truth is the truth of a life, 
the beliefs which nourish life have a title to 
being in league with reality which nothing 
save the decay of life can shake. That decay 
comes when the belief ceases to be a matter of 
life, when the inner spirit dies and only the 
husk remains. 

We again enforce our general conception 
by appeal to that Life which is the center of 
the Christian system. Jesus spoke of himself 
as the way, the truth, and the life. The doing 

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SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 

of his will, the walking in his way, leads to 
truth, and the truth bears witness to itself in 
life. Jesus came that we might have life and 
that we might have it more abundantly. This 
means full life, of course; it means a place 
for material interests even, and for all the de- 
lights of earthly existence. But it means 
more. If we are to find any sort of perspective 
and criterion for the doctrine which we have 
been preaching in this essay we have to assign 
different values to different kinds of life. Else 
the libertine might say, "I give myself up to 
physical appetite, and the resulting satisfac- 
tion bears witness to me that I have the 
truth." Or the intellectualist might say, "My 
manipulation of the syllogism satisfies me, and 
therefore I have the truth/ \ Or the devotee of 
any kind of art for art's own sake might 
declare that we had made a basis for his plea 
that the worship of beauty apart from any 
moral consideration is the sure path to the 
truth. Or any man with a whimsey or an 
aberration might come and say that he finds 
in his one idea the satisfaction which con- 
vinces him that he has the sole idea. The im- 

205 



*», 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

portant fact, then, is not only that our beliefs 
come out of life. There is the further ques- 
tion as to what kind of life, or rather whose 
life, for this matter must be brought to a 
personal and concrete basis before we can 
get far. 

For us, of course, the answer is close at 
hand that the life is revealed in Jesus Christ. 
Only we must be careful to make the word 
"life" inclusive enough. We include more in 
the life of Jesus than our fathers did — since 
we look upon many realms with favor which 
they regarded with suspicion. We find a 
place for recognition of the beautiful, for 
example, for which some of our ancestors had 
little toleration. We see too that the growing 
life of the race is detecting higher and higher 
reaches of moral life in the revelation which 
came with Jesus. We see the force of the 
teaching that the highest life comes with 
cutting ourselves off from some lower forms, 
that the energy may be most economically 
applied to the loftier problems. But there is 
something beyond all this. We often take the 
life of Jesus as consisting chiefly in what he 

206 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

did and taught. The importance of the passive 
side of his life, the significance of suffering, 
the marvelous alertness of his feeling against 
evil — all this is rather minimized in our 
thought to-day. Yet this would seem to be 
very nearly the secret of the revelation which 
came in Christ. The abundant life of feeling 
which we see in Christ, the body of sentiments, 
the surrounding atmospheres which the reader 
of the gospels senses rather than definitely 
discerns — these are that heart of Christ out 
of which come the issues of Christian life. 

The kind of life which the spirit of Christ 
quickens in us we look upon as having the 
right of way as the compelling force in belief- 
making. We cannot take Christ's recorded 
words and find in them full guidance for all 
the detailed complexities of our modern ex- 
istence. But study of the words of Christ will 
quicken our minds for to-day's problems. The 
value of the words of the Christ lies in their 
infinite suggestiveness. Not what they say 
but what they suggest — this is important. So 
with the life of Christ and the wonderful 
sweep of his feeling — not what it actually is 

207 



KELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

in the New Testament record, but what it 
prompts our lives to, the quick liveliness, the 
unremitting pressure — these are the essen- 
tials. Out of this pressure comes that demand 
for larger and larger life which I have dared 
call the principle of religious eminent domain, 
the movement toward religious expansion. 

Life has been defined as the adjustment of 
inner relations to outer relations. The defini- 
tion is more a crude and bungling description 
of life in one of its phases than a definition, 
and sometimes seems to mean that the life 
process consists in adapting organic life to the 
outer environment — making ourselves fit in 
with our surroundings. If the environment 
be taken in such large way that God is in- 
cluded, well and good ; but in general we have 
to reverse the process and avow that life is 
really working over the environment to fit our 
inner needs. It is so especially with the 
Christian life. In the name of life itself we 
stand against some facts even when we recog- 
nize them as facts. We protest, for example, 
that the visible things are not final. In the 
name of life itself we demand room in the 

208 



SUMMAKY AND CONCLUSION 

universe for the vital assumptions even if we 
have to reconstruct the universe. We are 
perpetually tearing down and building up in 
the name of larger and fuller life. Christ 
speaks in the name of humanity's highest life. 
His authority is the authority of one who 
comes in the name of life. 

How, then, does religious life actually 
proceed in belief -building? Consciously or 
unconsciously the mind makes its assump- 
tions. If these conflict with plain matters of 
fact they are given up. If they violate any of 
the principles of reason they are given up. If 
they are out of harmony with the catholic con- 
victions of the race they are viewed with 
suspicion. If, on the contrary, they minister 
to life, if the life itself becomes deeper and 
fuller, the life itself witnesses to the beliefs. 
We hold fast the beliefs until reason for doubt 
appears. If we must give up the belief we do 
not give it up as false if it has really minis- 
tered to life, but as less true than some newer 
conception to which the growing life urges us. 
Always, always, always, the fundamental fact 
is the pressure of the underlying life itself. 

209 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

From this the belief comes and by it the belief 
must be tested. The Christ who came that we 
might have life and have it more abundantly 
inspires us to make any assumption which the 
Christian life calls for and to hold fast to this 
assumption as true until reason for doubt 
appears. If we do the will we shall know the 
truth. 

We conclude, then, that in the search for 
religious certainty we should cease to expect 
any abstractly infallible standard which will 
settle all questions. No such standard can be 
found and no such standard is needed, for re- 
ligion deals primarily with life and not with 
mathematics. The issues of life abide in the 
realm of practical certainty rather than in 
that of abstract infallibility. We sow our 
grain and reap the harvest in reliance upon 
nature in a spirit of trust. We should find it 
hard to prove to our satisfaction that the sun 
will rise to-morrow morning, but would find 
relief in that the sun might rise while we were 
debating. The family life would be impossible 
except on a basis of mutual trust: the thought 
of infallible proof is ridiculous here. Hus- 

210 



SUMMAKY AND CONCLUSION 

bands trust their wives and wives their 
husbands, and both venture forward with faith 
in the training of children. The industrial 
and political and social systems know nothing 
of abstract infallibility. Now, religion is life 
at its best and highest. If faith is so much of 
ordinary life it must be the very core of 
religious life. 

Moreover, we require only a moment's reflec- 
tion to realize that this is as it should be, and 
that the glory in life consists just in the prac- 
tical certainties which are won by doing and 
trusting. Absolute infallibility and wooden 
predestined sureness would take all the zest 
from existence. Such infallibility would 
eliminate at a stroke all those convictions 
which result from moral training and moral 
insight. It would be the death of religion. If 
truth were blazoned visibly across the sky the 
moral life would suffer irretrievably. When 
Jesus was teaching on earth he took infinite 
pains to use such language that only the 
spiritually minded could understand him. He 
did not dare to speak too intelligibly. To 

have done so would have been to sweep into 

211 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

the ranks of his followers many of the wrong 
sort. 

Suppose the veil which screens off the future 
could be for a moment lifted, permitting us 
to see something of the life to come. Let us 
assume for the moment that we could have, 
if God so willed it, a glimpse of the final 
reward of the good and a glimpse of the final 
loss of the bad. Let it be indubitably revealed 
even to eyesight that the righteous are to gain 
life and the wicked to lose. What would be 
the result? Any movement that might there- 
after come toward righteousness on the part 
of evil might come solely from fear of punish- 
ment or hope of reward. A kingdom thus in- 
creased by the inrush of newcomers without 
spiritual motives would need an immense dis- 
missal, allowing the reward and punishment 
to become again so completely matters of trust 
that those who lacked trust would drop out. 
Heaven could not assimilate an immigration 
of citizens who might not come in a spirit of 
faith. 

We say further that not only do we make 
mistake in trying to find certainty in some 

212 



SUMMAKY AND CONCLUSION 

abstractly infallible standard, but we are 
wrong in trying to find it in any one thing. 
If we may be allowed a mathematical term 
we may say that religious certainty is the 
function of many factors. No one force is 
sufficient. Eeligious certainty is the resultant 
of many forces working together. 

There is need of fixing this thought firmly 
in our religious reflection. Even when men 
are able to see that there can really be no 
abstract infallibility in the religious realm 
they are not always able to see that practical 
certainty cannot be found in any single ele- 
ment, and so they keep searching for some one 
factor out of which the certainty arises. We 
have been led astray by these partial views. 
Certainty comes of the total life, but the 
factors which make life possible are too many 
to be enumerated. There is needed to-day on 
the part of theologians more of a synthetic 
and comprehensive spirit. The theologians 
have run to specialties. We are in somewhat 
the same plight as that in which the study of 
life-giving forces in the world of nature has 
placed us. Various theories prevail to-day as 

213 



EELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 

to the prevention and cure of disease. We 
have emphasis on scores of remedies, on baths 
and massages, on mental attitudes, and even 
on the importance of thoroughly masticating 
our food. It would please some minds to take 
any one of these various methods of attaining 
to physical health and to erect it even into 
a religious observance. Quite likely every 
method which professes to promote health has 
some virtue. The difficulty appears when any 
one method is taken alone. The wise practi- 
tioner seeks for the good in all the methods. 
Restoration to health might in some instances 
come as the resultant of them all. 

Just as we need in medicine a return of 
confidence in the old-fashioned general practi- 
tioner, so we need in theology an interest in a 
comprehensive ability to see all the life-factors 
which work for the production of certainty. 
Or just as we need at all times in warfare the 
strategist who can sweep into view the factors 
in the entire field of campaign, so we need 
breadth of vision in the theological field. 
Just as we need statesmen and industrial 
captains whose strength lies in grasp on all 

214 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

the factors of a situation, so we need compre- 
hensiveness in the theologian. We have had 
critics and specialists in abundance. We now 
need theologians who can look beyond a single 
specialty and fit together into statement the 
various factors working together for the 
maintenance of religious life. We must do 
the will of God if we would know the truth, 
but in doing the will of God we must not so 
emphasize one factor as to exclude another. 
The Church has her part, and the Bible its 
part, and the individual personal experiences 
their part, and the outside forces, too nu- 
merous to mention, their part also. We are 
dealing with life. Who can say that this 
factor or that is the only agent in the produc- 
tion of life? « 

Life is a vague term, and yet the very 
recollection that we are dealing with life helps 
us to keep our balance as to religious cer- 
tainty. We cannot have a final formula where 
life is concerned. All the attempts to define 
life in formula have ended in ridiculous in- 
adequacies. So when some inquirer protests 
against the silence which meets his demand 

215 



KELIGIOUS CEETAINTY 

for abstract formula we must remember that 
sometimes silence is a sign that there is too 
much to say. If Christianity is life at its 
highest and best there is no way of condensing 
it into formula. Simplifications are good 
enough as laying emphasis on this factor or 
that, but there is really no simplifying of 
Christianity as long as it is alive. And this 
just because anything alive is complex. The 
very fact that we can make no compendious 
statement may be an indication of the life of 
our belief. We cannot completely understand 
Christianity as long as it is alive. It partakes 
of the general mystery of life. The very fact 
that it provokes to so much questioning, how- 
ever, is an indication of its aliveness. 

Just as we cannot appeal to any analysis of 
life to settle our problems for us, so we can- 
not appeal to precedents as final, for it is true 
of Christianity as of all other living realities 
that she is constantly revising her own prece- 
dents. That is to say, everything she does 
throws light upon her past and revises that 
past. The Scriptures have to be reread in the 
light of fresher and fresher knowledge. Of 

216 



SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 

course, the words are the same and abiding, 
but the meaning is fluid as long as the system 
is alive. And we cannot predict what the life 
will in the future call for. We may be sure 
that as long as Christianity is alive she will 
take whatever truth she finds anywhere. 
When new worlds are discovered Christianity 
will appropriate these in the name of her 
Lord. Whatever modifications are made in 
thought to bring thought nearer reality Chris- 
tianity will forthwith seize for herself. 

But what about error, after all? Some error 
will be sloughed off in the life process. Some 
error will cling for a while in parasitic de- 
pendence on the life, but the life sometimes 
shows its vitality in its ability to carry the 
parasites. Some error will be deliberately cut 
out, but in general the Church will deal with 
error by deepening the springs of the life. As 
we reach in our doing closer to the truth we 
shall find that the error will disappear. It 
will not survive in the changed conditions as 
they move on toward larger and larger life. 

We end as we began. There is no abstract 
standard of religious certainty outside that 

217 



KELIGIOTJS CERTAINTY 

realm where the deductive intellect draws its 
important but rather scanty conclusions. The 
issues are the issues of life. These issues do 
not come from any one center, though they all 
at last must play upon the will. Anything 
whatever which influences the will of men to 
the doing of the will of God is in so far an 
agent of religious certainty, but no one can 
state all these influences. It is for us to give 
ourselves to the living of the religious life and 
the certainty will take care of itself. It is true 
yesterday, to-day, and forever that he that 
willeth to do the will of God shall know of 
the doctrine, whether it be true. 

In one of the Resurrection stories we are 
told that as the disciples beheld their risen 
Lord on one of his appearances they heard 
his voice saying, "Handle me and see." The 
hand is the instrument of the will serving to 
correct the impressions of mere vision and to 
keep men close to the great outside forces. 
We do no violence to the symbolism of the 
story when we reflect that there is a mass of 
will activities in the world to-day which con- 
stitute for us a manifestation of Christ. As 

218 



SUMMAEY AND CONCLUSION 

we bring our wills into touch with these we 
find a corrective which keeps us from the 
aberrations of that type of vision which some- 
times shows an inclination to get away from 
reality. Some skepticism dies of itself as soon 
as the hand lays hold upon the life activities 
of the kingdom of God, We find here too a 
corrective of feeling. We do not fall into 
morbidness when our wills are busy. We are 
like the bystanders at a fearful disaster who 
lose their sickening sense of distress as soon 
as their hands reach forth to relieve the 
stricken. By handling, that is to say, by 
setting our wills to do the work of living 
Christianity, we come to a peculiar certainty 
about Christ and the power of his life. 

In these volitional activities speculation 
gets a firm base, feeling is kept healthy, and 
the Church is held away from foolish aber- 
rations and asceticisms. But we must re- 
member that the springs of life are within, 
that the driving force is the inherent passion 
of the soul for larger life, that this force must 
not be allowed to dry up into a kind of barren 
practicalism, that the outward activities must 

219 



KELIGIOTTS CEETAINTY 

be the expression of inner stirrings. It was 
the love of the disciples which opened their 
eyes to the presence of the Christ. It was his 
response to that love which sent them forth 
with a vital message for a world which needed 
life. They kept the balance between the 
promptings of the inner spirit and the cor- 
rections and qualifications and elaborations 
which came as they wrought with their hands 
to build and bless. And out of it all came 
that gospel of life which convinces us that the 
whole man, in all his powers, is himself an 
instrument for the seizure of truth, and that 
the truth in its final statement is fullness and 
richness of life. The whole man is the instru- 
ment and the whole man is the end. 

And now, after all that has been said, some 
will feel that our putting of the grounds for 
religious certainty does not constitute an 
argument. Some may look upon our state- 
ment that religious life moves in a realm 
above the strictly logical as a surrender of all 
claim to be logical. We do not make such 
surrender. We believe that the view which 

we have presented is logical — not in the sense 

220 



KEIIGIOUS CEKTAINTY 
that it moves with mathematical exactness, 



but in the sense that it is in harmony with the 
reasonableness with which the mind makes 
itself at home in the universe. In fact, the 
mind imposes itself so completely upon the 
system of things around us as to make scien- 
tific constructions which are, it may be 
claimed, entirely opposed to the facts as they 
present themselves to our senses. Moreover, 
great systems of idealism have been, and are, 
possible in the realm of high philosophy, and 
these grow out of the demands of the mind. 
Our argument is this : That the entire life of 
man has the right of way ; that it is entitled to 
such conceptions as will make it at home in 
the universe; that back of our beliefs there 
must be some adequate cause; and that if the 
total effect of the belief on the human life is 
good the cause must not be merely equal to 
the effect, but must be as good as the effect. 
Under the influence of some conceptions we 
see characters becoming more and more 
solid and substantial. That which makes for 
solidity of character cannot itself be empty 
and vain. "By their fruits ye shall know 

221 



SUMMAKY AND CONCLUSION 

them." We know no better logic than this. 
If the fruit is nourishing, the leaf and the 
limb and the trunk and the root which pro- 
duce it must lay hold upon reality. The 
substance of the fruit is drawn from the 
system of things, and the juices of the fruit 
are distilled from the life currents which flow 
from the heart of reality. This may not be 
formal logic, but it would seem to be at least 
good sense, and upon good sense Christianity 
rests its claim. 



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